Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
How many couples do you know who are still married after 40-50 years?
I graduated highschool in 1977. From my graduating class there is one couple that I am aware of who married in that era and they are still together.
I married in 1981, this is our 40th year together.
In my profession, long-term marriages are very rare. I have seen hundreds of co-workers who were married and within a year the wives filed for divorce, in absentia. In my career, I witnessed two long-term marriages.
Within the Submariner community, wives need to be females who are very independent-minded and career-focused, and who are comfortable with the idea that their husband will be gone for 7 months of each year. If a female has some need to visit her husband every month then she is simply not a good prospect for becoming the wife of a submariner.
... Wracking my brain for an explanation, I can only suggest, that the difference may have nothing to do with any of the factors mentioned. It might simply be due to the fact, that the couples that met in HS and end up celebrating their 50th anniversary together are those, who came from stable and loving family backgrounds, while perhaps at least one member of the couples who end up splitting up by their early-to-mid 20's didn't come from such a background.
I think I can see what you are saying.
I am not arguing with you, I generally agree.
My bride was an orphan. Soon after we married I brought her to my hometown and she met my grandparents. They were hard-of-hearing and their normal conversations were shouted. After a few hours of us talking together, my grandparents went into another room, and we could easily hear them. They liked my wife, and they were sad that it was so obvious to them that we would soon be divorced. In the world-view of my grandparents, an orphan could not possibly have a long-term marriage, because she was not raised in a stable loving family.
What they failed to see, was that I married a girl who is fiercely independent and driven. When we were dating, I explained to her a detailed image of my long term life goals. She liked them, and she pledged to me that she would partner with me to focus on achieving those goals.
After forty years of marriage, looking back I don't think 'romance' has ever entered into my wife's mind, but neither has she divorced me.
I completely understand where my grandparents were coming from, which is the same idea as what you have expressed.
Wow. OK. Except that there were tons of guys in college at the time who weren't getting drafted and shipped off. There were student deferments, or something, weren't there?.
'College deferments' were common.
I reported onboard my first boat in 1978. At that time, the entire crew before me had been draftees, who had gotten college deferments to avoid the draft. So long as they stayed in college they could avoid serving in VN. But when they finished college, then their deferment ran out. Walking into a military recruiters office from a college campus, somehow they figured out that if they told the recruiter they wanted to volunteer for submarines it would get them out of going into the infantry. They could serve on subs for six years and be discharged. In 1978, the draft was over, but those guys were still on the hook to finish their six-year contracts.
I walked into a community of men, who were all college graduates, who had earned GI Bill funding to give them an additional 4-years of college tuition. So they were making plans for which universities to apply to next, and how to maneuver it into PhDs.
I think that most people I know have stayed long-time married, except for my parents and my aunt and uncle and my husband's brother and one of his cousins.
That includes close friends and family members. And my husband and me.
My parents are still together. They have been married for 57 years. My marriage only lasted 25 years before we divorced. One thing I learned is that When people got married back in the 60's they seemed to take it more seriously than couples do now. Their discussions took place behind closed doors and its only now (I'm 54 years old) that I realize they have their problems too. My mistake was thinking that all I had to do was emulate my father and grandfather to be considered a good husband. Boy did I make a big mistake. There is more to being married than keeping a roof over your heads, paying bills, and doing all you can for your children (or so you think).
I think another question would be what percentage of those married 40+ years are still ‘happily married’?
I’ve heard that 50% of marriages make it long term and of that 50% — maybe 20% are happy. If you take 100 couples, that means 10 wind up happily married long term. Can we really blame folks for skipping marriage?
I did rep you but I disagree with your statement that boomers are "divorce prone."
I'm a Boomer and proud of it. We have nothing to be ashamed of. We are the product of our times, just like every other generation. We are the first generation to come of age when it was actually acceptable to divorce, so yes there are more divorces in our age group than in previous decades.
Many Millennials don't want to get married because they saw a lot of bad marriages and divorces in their Boomer parents because the Boomer parents were raised by people who should have divorced but didn't. My own parents stayed married for various reasons. They shouldn't have married in the first place. (Too many post WWII marriages took place between kids who were waiting for each other during the war.)
There are tons of marriages from the 40's and 50's that should have ended in divorce but didn't. That's why a lot of Boomers divorced, because society had relaxed and there was a sexual, drug, political and cultural revolution going on. Still, the 25 couples I mentioned from my high school lived through all that as teenagers and young adults. How are they divorce prone?
Statistics also show that after 1 or 2 marriages, people tend to stick with the 2nd and especially 3rd spouse much longer than the previous marriages. It will be interesting to see what the children of Millennials do. And may their kids criticize them as much as we get criticized.
I wasn’t attacking boomers. Actually boomers and Gen Xers had similar upbringings in the pre digital world and both generations have become quite similar as they have aged. Still we did have some key differences in our younger years because of the times we came of age in. As you pointed out there was more social change ongoing when boomers came of age and married. The societal changes of the 60s and 70s likely are the reason boomer divorce rates are higher than other generations. As you said we are all products of our time. Gen Xers like me came of age in an era that was a conservative reaction to the 60s and early 70s. Our generation experienced no sexual revolution or an era of liberalization of drug use. On the contrary society pulled back on all that. We also had grown up seeing a lot of divorces and we saw the misery they caused. This may be an explanation for the differences in divorce rates. I’m not saying we don’t have too many divorces in our generation because we did. I know plenty of folks who experienced that unpleasantness. The stats however do suggest that Gen X has done well with marriage even though we are the last generation that still married young and in larger numbers.
The millennials are not getting married young and many are not getting married at all. The ones who have married however are staying together. They have the best rate of staying married when compared to boomers and Gen X. As Fleetibell suggested Howe not many of them will have 50 year marriages simply because it has become more of a standard to marry later in life for their generation. I do believe however in 10-20 years a lot of Gen Xers will start celebrating 50th anniversaries. If many of us have made 30 years then many will make 50.
I do agree with you that many marriages from the 50s and 60s were held together only by the fact that there was a stigma around divorce. No doubt many of them spent their lives with people they wish they had not married.
I know a lot of them. Of course the older ones but also those who are coming up on 35, 40 years married. I grew up in a family oriented area, considered a good place to raise kids, good schools, low crime, etc. People who wanted stable lives settled there. Many of my classmates married young and are still married, and stayed in the same area. Now they run businesses, coach little league, volunteer at school, etc. I'm surprised how many of them were from the "party" crowd and did not have the best parental examples but they wanted something different for themselves.
My ex bf from a broken family claimed when he got married divorce would be totally off the table. That didn't fly with me because I would not want to be trapped in a marriage in case things really were not working, and it was creepy. What would he do if his future wife filed for divorce, take her out first so he could be widowed instead of divorced? He ended up marrying a girl with no self esteem who was grateful to be married at all, and he kept her that way. Guy wanted to be the opposite of his father but ended up a lot more like him than he would admit. It's just that he picked a woman who wouldn't be able to leave him unlike his mom who left his dad. That's cheating.
My own parents went 50 years and thought the sun rose and set on each other from beginning to end. They talked about everything, laughed a lot and hardly ever fought. I was surprised when I started dating and met so many people with weird ideas about relationships and who could not be in them in a functional way.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
He ended up marrying a girl with no self esteem who was grateful to be married at all, and he kept her that way. Guy wanted to be the opposite of his father but ended up a lot more like him than he would admit. It's just that he picked a woman who wouldn't be able to leave him unlike his mom who left his dad. That's cheating.
