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In my family there aren't a lot of divorces. One of my aunts got divorced because she was abused and an uncle (other side of the family)got divorced because his wife stole money from him, ran up his credit then left. My aunt has kids, my uncle never did (he doesn't like kids and never wanted them).
I know a lot of people who got divorced and some are definitely valid like infidelity, abuse etc. The saddest is some of the kids in my Sunday School come from divorced parents and you can tell it has an impact. In one of the cases the dad has been married three additional times and that has messed up the kids.
Well I grew up in an affluent area (Mitt Romney lived in our town, though most not near THAT affluent) and while among college educated upper middle class couples divorce is rather uncommon (it just is in that demographic), knowing hundreds of couples with only knowing two that are divorced is pretty out there statistically.
Lots of people that divorce don't "believe in divorce", so I'm not sure how much that has to do with it. I think in the town I grew up in, with the low divorce rate (I had one friend in HS that had divorced parents, thats it) there must have been a whole lot of sham marriages out there.
I'm reasonably sure my Irish Catholic mother-in-law, steeped due to her age and ethnicity in the cultural sentiment that divorce is quite simply not an option, did not "believe in" divorce. That did not stop her spouse of more than two decades from leaving once the kids were grown, though. She didn't choose for her marriage to end, but it ended anyway. One party's beliefs and ideals are not the whole story. By all accounts, marriage vows meant a good deal to my MIL. My FIL, less so, at least the first time around. In his second marriage, his wife divorced him. By that point in time, his marriage vows could have been quite important to him, though not to his wife at the time. I don't really know.
You don't normally hear about the good things in forums, TV, and media. It's human nature to complain. Just think about this forum if nobody complained, nobody would probably read it. Just like in movies, it's never about a bunch of happy people where nothing goes wrong, there is always some type of protagonist.
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You don't normally hear about the good things in forums, TV, and media. It's human nature to complain. Just think about this forum if nobody complained, nobody would probably read it. Just like in movies, it's never about a bunch of happy people where nothing goes wrong, there is always some type of protagonist.
The vows I spoke at our wedding were a superficial exercise in trying to make my wife cry out of being overly romantic. But the meaning behind them is rock solid and something I take very seriously. Honestly, I think once little ones come along, failing to prioritize my marriage will be doing my children a life-altering disservice.
Marriage needs to be more than a vehicle to satisfy the innate need to be loved. But individual needs and gratification far outweigh the sense of being part of something bigger (a characteristic of our times), so once there's even a slight storm people are quick to abandon ship.
I'm divorced and I don't like it when people who are happily married throw phrases like this title out. Sometimes things just don't work out and not for lack of trying. I am very happy for people who make it work. I know it's not easy. I went in with the best of intentions, and even though it ended a year later under really hurtful circumstances and he did things I never ever believed he would do, I will admit on the day of our marriage I think he had the best of intentions too. I think almost everyone DOES believe their vows when they speak them.
I'm sure there are people who quit when things get tough. But sometimes one person wants to work it out and the other person refuses. Sometimes people cheat, sometimes they grow apart for whatever reason. I don't think it's fair for other people to judge. The only people who really know what happened are the two people in the relationship. There are also a lot of people out there who are so committed to their vows they stay in marriages that bring them misery because they would rather be unhappy than break their vows. That's not for me to judge either.
My aunt is almost 60 and she has been divorced 4 times. Her first marriage was at 14. My cousins went through ugly divorces because their wives cheated on them non stop. My uncles (two have since passed away) also went through nasty divorces but it was because they cheated on their wives. My mother is currently married to a great man. But other than her, if you want a poster child for dysfunction and divorce, half of my family is it.
It just seems like I'm constantly hearing/reading things about people who don't seem to take their marriage vows seriously...at all.
For example, a friend of mine threatened to leave her husband if he didn't quit his job so that they could move to her hometown.
I saw a thread here a little while ago where people were telling a woman to leave her husband because he didn't buy her a Christmas present.
Also, when googling how to remove fingernail polish from a sofa (don't ask), I came across the desperate cries of a woman whose two-year-old had gotten nail polish all over her mother-in-law's sofa and whose husband was "thinking about leaving her" because of it.
SERIOUSLY?
When I said my marriage vows, I vowed to stay with my husband "for better or for worse."
Leaving someone for cheating or something like that is understandable, but really...over Christmas presents or a ruined sofa?
Anyone have any thoughts on this???
You mean aside from flogging this dead horse again?
The topic of moving has come up on here a few times. Often enough there are other factors involved. Maybe you've never lived in a place you absolutely hated, or maybe you've never spent half your life at the mercy of your spouse's career such that your whole marriage seems to revolve around his job, like he's the star and you're some kind of satellite.
The Christmas present thing was just one symptom of many in that marriage. That guy had a pattern of treating her like an afterthought. It wasn't just about the present.
I don't know about the nail polish thread, but for all we know, the woman has a pattern of ineffectual parenting (what is a 2-year-old doing with a bottle of nail polish? what if the kid drank it?), maybe she has a substance abuse issue and wasn't paying attention to what her kid was doing for the eleventy-billionth time, or maybe she's an unholy slob at home and he's tired of living in a pigsty.
The bottom line is that usually by the time people come to the internet to seek input from a million strangers, there are so many issues in their marriage that they don't know where to start, but one small thing stands out as the proverbial straw, or it's the "little thing that represents all the big things."
On the surface, it would seem that my last serious relationship, which lasted about 7 years, ended because he was 40 minutes late. That might seem petty, but if I told you about what it represented in the grand scheme--an increasing disrespect for my time, a penchant for taking me for granted as evidenced by a cavalier attitude, a tendency to make promises he didn't keep, irresponsibility and excuse-making, a tendency to blame me for his mistakes, and an unwillingness to listen when I told him his actions upset me--then it might not seem like it was a one-shot, out-of-nowhere thing.
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