aegix drakan said:
That and the pre-divorce numbers might be inflated by the fact that until recently, divorce was a MASSIVE social no-no. So waaaay fewer people did it, since the common mentality was "You MUST stick it through. No excuses. You promised society and your god that you would be with this person forever, so you MUST."
I don't care to enter into an argument about the sex before marriage thing, because I assure you I am not going to budge on that. Now, what I'm about to say regarding this quote has absolutely nothing to do with arranged marriages, forced marriages, advantageous marriages, abusive marriages, or marriages between "religiously brainwashed" people. Those are completely different situations from what I am talking about here, so please do not bring any of those up to try and dilute the point I'm making. That being said, here goes:
Do you really think a heightened desire to salvage a marriage is really such a bad thing? Many here in the thread are saying that people are getting married too fast, or for the wrong reasons. They just jump on in. Then, later if the water is too hot or too cold, they jump back out again. Easy in, easy out. They don't try to work things out or find a middle ground. But if you truly love someone, you will work for that. And truly, that is what relationships are. Work. And lots of it. Today's easy divorces are just ways of getting out of that work, which as statistics show more and more people in our generation don't like to do.
Marriage as a whole is being seen less and a permanent thing and more like flight school. Our own social "revolutions" have given birth to a "crash and trash" mentality when it comes to marriage. It's not a big deal anymore, whereas in the past if a couple married, it was quite expected they were to be together for life. The fact that society expected them to be together," as you said, reinforced that fact in their mind, causing them to regard marriage as a permanent thing. Now, since society doesn't expect them to stay together anymore, that desire to make an effort to make things better is gone. What could have been a "reconcilable difference" before is now grounds for divorce. Why fix what you can just throw away altogether?
Now, I know at this point you probably have all sorts of contradictions in your head to what I just said. But just look back at the top and remember those exclusions I listed. What I just said only pertains to marriages formed from love, and nothing else. And now, you may say that a marriage formed from love is not comparable to the past, but I'd like you to tell that to my parents and my grandparents, who have been together for 30 and ~48 years respectively. I can tell you from personal experience that they are all perfectly in love with each other. Their marriages were founded on pure love, long before the divorce rate hit its peak.
Also, just to touch on your little point on living with them for 6 months before marriage, I think you are rather selling yourself short to assume that you cannot learn someone's character unless you are living with them. And even so, if the little nuances of living with someone like leaving the cap off the toothpaste or leaving the toilet seat up are enough to break your relationship, I don't think it was destined to go too far in the first place. If you decide to live with someone and you aren't sure if you can argue with them or work the little things out, then I think you missed an important step somewhere.
