Evolving Thoughts on "The Big D"

Mood: Thoughtful and pensive

Listening to: Wonderwall Live (Oasis) and the beautiful silence that is one child in school and the other asleep.

I was reading Cosmo last night (ever notice how many of my posts start with “So I was reading _______ last night and …”? Almost all of them.) and found out that divorce rates have fall to about 40 percent, contrary to the popular believe that divorce is holding strong at about 55% of the married population. In fact, it has been falling for the past 15 years. Wait, what? So all of the fear mongering about marriages being destined to fail was all false? That’s it, I’m having an affair. Kidding, kidding. I was really heartened to see this as marriage has been portrayed as a dying institution ever since I can remember. Apparently, members of my generation (late 70’s – early 80’s kids) took a lesson from many of our miserable upbringings and have decided that marriage should be thought through before entrance and that once you do get shackled, you better make an effort to make it work or you will be paying for your kid’s therapy when they get older. I like it. Not only that, but our generation has much more information at our fingertips (Google, I am looking at you and thanking the stars) to help us through the inevitable rocky times that come with spending your life with another person.

Up until just very recently, I believed that my husband and I are rather unusual in our views of marriage. (Then again, I love being unique, but am constantly reminded that no one is all that unique. It’s all been done before.) We are both rather old fashioned about both marriage and divorce. My husband comes from a wonderful, stable family. I come from a very dysfunctional divorced family. Being of the old school Indian mind, my husband finds divorce a very unpalatable solution in all but the most awful situations. Me, having multiple issues and hang-ups from my home life growing up feel the same way. Just about the only situation that I find divorce acceptable for myself would be if my husband lost his mind and was beating me or my kids. Now, my husband is so nonviolent that he has difficulty killing cockroaches, so I think we probably won’t be dealing with that anytime soon, thank god. And really, my aversion to divorce isn’t really about myself that much, even though I love him and that would put the icing on the cake of my insanity, it’s more about not watching my kids having go through some of the more awful fallout of divorce. This also gives me a lot of hope for my group of friends. As previously mentioned, I occasionally think of the odds of me or my friends getting a divorce solely based on data facts (like parental divorce). I’m sure I will encounter a friend or two that will get divorced in the future, but it gives me hope that people my age are giving serious thought to ending a marriage, rather than just jumping off the train because it’s occasionally uncomfortable.

So here’s to long, happy, worked at marriages.

Becky