Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Taking the Emotion Out of Marriage

Yesterday, my parents celebrated 34 years of marriage. In this day and age, that seems like quite a feat. I'm sure it hasn't always been easy and that there were times that they wanted to call it quits, but they managed to work through it.

My experiences with my parents' marriage as well as the successful ones of some of my friends make this article that I read today seem hilarious. They have reduced the success rate of marriage to a blend of statistics. Blaming things like whether or not they are poor, drink, smoke, have children, etc as the sole reason for divorce.

I am not denying that these things will have an impact on whether or not a couple will stay together. But, it seems to me that it would be an amalgam of factors that would lead to the demise of a marriage. It's easy to point a finger and say "well he was divorced before so therefore our marriage was doomed from the start." It's much harder to look at all of the factors that make up a relationship to figure out where things went wrong. Did the couple talk to one another? Were they honest with one another? Were they faithful? Was one of them verbally or physically abusive? Did each person contribute equally to the relationship? I'm sure that these are all underlying factors.

I mean if a person gets divorced just because their partner had kids prior to their marriage, then they probably should not have gotten married to begin with. . .

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