Making Your Marriage Last
By Owen Walcher
When I was growing up (and I am a late baby boomer), divorce was almost unheard of. Today it is rampant. In fact, gen-X and the following generation "Y" members have a divorce rate over 68%. What is happening to our world?
Although I was raised in a fairly strict religious family, I can understand the need for divorce. Some of my friends parents, who were obviously staying together for the children (we assume this because after the kids were grown and gone, they broke up), sould never have stayed together.
It was always embarrassing to go over the Tommies house, because his parents were always fighting, yelling at each other, and generally creating a caustic environment for the kids to grow up in. Tommy is on his third wife, and I know most of his sisters have been married and divorced at least once.
So was it the "being raised in a chaotic environment" that has caused these people to be dysfunctional in their relationships? Or is it that it is too easy to get married and divorced these days? Most states now have no-fault divorce, so no grounds are required. Even the churches have become more lax in who they will marry, whereas 20 years ago, you had to go through a long program to make sure you were compatible, and willing to deal with each others differences.
I am not saying divorce is wrong either. All people grow, and if a couple doesn't grow together, or at least in the same direction, there can be problems. Who am I kidding? I have been married almost 25 years myself, and there were times when my wife and I were willing to call it quits.
Marriage takes effort, and constant monitoring of the relationship by both parties to keep on track. It is not enough to say "I love you", even if you mean it. Sometimes you don't. You also need to ask "how are things between us?" or "how could we be doing better than we are now?"
Children grow up and leave, jobs change, folks get cancer. This is the natural progression in life. you may have been fulfilled as the stay at home mom, taking care of the kids and sport and dance and theater and whatever needed to be done. But what do you after children? This is as rocky a time as any for relationships to strain. If you want to make it, you have to keep working at it, and if you find you have grown apart, and cannot provide what each other needs in the relationship, maybe it is time to cash in the chips and call it quits.
Just don't do it without making sure there is nothing recoverable there, because 20+ years of commitment is worth a lot these days, and really, do you want to end up as just another statistic?
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