Marriages Through the Years

Stumbled on a question on social media.

Why aren’t there long marriages like back in our grandparents day?

The interesting aspect of it was the certainty of the commenters.

They all know the secret!

“God needs to be the third member of the marriage,” one woman wrote. “We’ve lost God in our society so we don’t have long marriages anymore.”

A whole bunch of people jumped on that poor woman and destroyed her regarding her belief that a shared love of God was required.

“Social media has ruined relationships!” One young man proclaimed. “Women are slutting it up by finding their old boyfriends.”

Sounded like that dude had a very specific problem.

Then.

“This is a me-me-me society now. People aren’t willing to commit to one another.”

Others blamed it on the fact that women now have more control over some of the financial aspects.

“Back then, women HAD to stay married. They didn’t work so they couldn’t build up credit and they had to stay with their husbands who controlled them.”

I have been married for quite some time now, and I think that there is probably a bit of truth in those last couple of comments.

Society has changed. There are less marriages now, I believe, and people are having fewer children.

Attention spans do seem shorter, and women definitely have more options now than they did back in the 50’s or 60’s.

But none of it can be explained away in a sweeping generalization of ‘this is what will be’.

Relationships aren’t easy, ever.

A lot of it is summed up in straight up commitment.

There’s one life and people should be happy. If they aren’t, there are options, but I think of my grandparents, parents and in-laws…

…all marathon marriages that weren’t always perfect…

…but they stayed.

I know a guy who divorced his wife after more than 50 years of marriage.

That’s insane to me, but he seems happier.

“Should’ve done it 40 years ago,” he said.

Then he went on to tell me all about her and how she’s been having some health problems and how they’ve leaned on each other to get through it.

Love changes. Marriages change. Yearning for how it once was isn’t the key to making it all the way through.

But in the end, we may run out of the 50-60-70 year couplings.

And that’s all right, too?

There are people out in Utah who have multiple wives and dozens of children…

…to each their own…

…but that sounds horrific to me!

Early on in our marriage Kathy asked:

“If anything happened to me would you remarry?”

I answered quickly.

“No. You ruined it for everyone.”