*I should have written this down last night when I couldn’t sleep. I think it was less disjointed. Now that I’m writing it, it’s more stream-of-consciousness than anything else, but I’m going to let it stand as is.*
The older I get, the more of my peers get divorced. I suppose on some level this is natural, but each time I hear about it it makes me sadder than the last time.
People still tout the 50% divorce rate number, but the vast majority fail to realize where it comes from. While it’s true that 50% of marriages end in divorce, the vast majority of those are either not a first marriage (since the success of marriage decreases with each additional marriage you have) and people who married before they were 25. Those two factors constitute a significant percentage of failed marriages, but few people realize it.
It’s gotten to a point where I can see it coming for other people. There’s not much you can say to people you know have already started down that road. The longer they’re together, the harder the inevitable end is. It’s really easy to fall into the traps that were laid by our parents. People from a broken home may stay longer in a non-working marriage to prove that they can be more successful and make better choices than their parents. People from a solid home, whose parents are still together may feel they need to live up to their parents’ example. Either way, it’s a trap, that you can’t leave, that you have something to prove, that you have to stay together for the children.
I don’t buy it. As someone whose parents stayed together "for the children", I have to say that is one of the worst excuses to stay together. Remember that you and your spouse are modeling to your children what a romantic relationship is supposed to be. By staying together so your kids aren’t from a broken home, you’re teaching them that a normal relationship is when people don’t speak, or scream, or belittle each other or are passive-aggressive, or, or, or… An unhappy marriage teaches children to settle for what they have and live in misery.
Almost all of the marriages I’ve seen fall apart, whether up close or from a distance, have been people who were married too young. They are also families with children. There’s a progression that happens. No one wants to admit to failure, especially in a "’til death do us part" situation, so even after it’s unsalvagable, we try to "fix" things.
Sometimes it’s having a baby or talking about having a baby. Sometimes it’s making a drastic life change, uprooting yourself and your family from everything familiar. Sometimes it’s having an affair. Sometimes something else, but nothing ever actually works. We wind up fooling ourselves that if only *something* were different, we would be stronger as a couple, we would beat the odds, we would force ourselves to step up to the new challenge and come out on the other side, better than we started out.
It’s never true. All we do is postpone the inevitable. We convince ourselves that we change, that he can change, that she can change. We believe that things will be different , or maybe that things will be the same as they used to be.
We who find ourselves in the high end of the divorce rate start so young that we grow up while we’re married. We spend our early years of marriage trying to figure out who we are, but that’s all tied up in our spouse and/or children. Eventually there comes a point where we realize that we have no idea who we are outside of the marriage. The lucky few who can do that are the ones whose marriages actually work in the longer term.
But when you marry at 18 or 20 or 23, you don’t get a chance to figure out who you are, or what you want, or what you want from a relationship. Even if you’re lucky enough to figure it out while juggling a spouse and a family, you have to drag them along with you in order to achieve any of your goals. This isn’t often fair to another adult, who probably doesn’t share your goals, especially if his/her goals were also undefined when you started out on this "life-long" endeavor.
Another issue that (formerly) young couples face is losing an old friend in the process. Marrying young means that you grow up together and, often, that your spouse was your best friend, at least for part of the time. A friend of mine, J*, while his marriage was first starting to fall apart, would say over and over again that his wife was his BFF and, no matter what else happened, he would never EVER lose her as his BFF. We haven’t talked about it, but I’d venture to guess that he’s learned that’s not the case. Once you even start thinking about a split, that relationship, the friendship part, is over. No one wants to hear about the dating exploits of their ex. No one wants to tell the person who is causing their heartbreak that, how and why they’re hurting. Beyond the death of a relationship, beyond the ending of a marriage, there is no way to salvage the friendship that existed before. However you both come out the other side, even if you’re still civil and making the effort, neither one of you is the same person who entered that relationship.
It’s interesting to me that the older I get, the more I see, not only the young marriages of my peers falling apart, but the ones that are long dead are replaced, to some extent, with new marriages, often to a young spouse. I can think of two people off the top of my head who were married very young, had a child, got divorced and then married someone under the age of 25 and started a new family. It gives them similar odds to their first marriage, since they have a previous marriage as a strike, and their partner has age as a strike. Don’t get me wrong, I wish them well, but I can’t help wondering whether or not they’ll last. A woman who marries at 23 has the same odds of divorce as a woman who marries at 18. A man who marries at 30, for the second time, has similar odds of divorce as a man who married at 19.
I know that it doesn’t get easier to let go the older you get. I know that a 30 year old woman whose marriage is ending after 10+ years is going to have at least as hard a time as a 24 year old woman who has been married for 6 years, but I wonder if the second marriage is easier. I wonder if those 30-somethings will have an easier time walking away if the second marriage fails, too, and how that will affect the younger spouse. With both of the situations I can think of, I don’t see a shadow of doom over the relationships, but they’re new, both marriages having been in effect for only 2 years, give or take. It’s not until the novelty wears off, some 4, 5, 6 years in that it becomes obvious, at least to people who have seen it before and recognize the signs.
I’d like to see divorce lose some of its stigma, to be honest. I don’t know if it’s religious or societal or something else or a combination, but the idea that divorce is bad is still pervasive, and people often think it’s the easy way out. It’s not easy, at least not when children are involved. What’s hard is figuring out how to raise your children to be whole and healthy people. Divorce, in and of itself has no bearing on that. Children should be raised to understand how to treat people with kindness and should be shown what healthy relationships, of all types, look like. Children should NOT be raised to suffer in silence and to make sacrifices for an imaginary benefit that never actually comes to fruition.
But divorce isn’t the problem. The problem is getting married younger than 25. The problem is thinking that, at 21, you can commit to "forever". The probl
em is assuming that tying yourself to another adult for the rest of your life will be enough satisfaction. The problem is that you probably haven’t had the chance to experience what’s really out there. The problem is that family is too often defined as marriage and keeping a baby generally means "let’s get hitched!"
Eventually it falls apart. People think I’m jaded, but the statistics are on my side. If you don’t allow yourself to grow up as an individual, if you don’t give yourself a chance to figure out who you are *without* a partner, your marriage will not last. I’m sure they exist, but people who can truly define themselves before they turn 25 are few and far between.
I’m sad for all the marriages that end, especially those begun in optimism. It was never going to be happily ever after, not for any of us, but I think it’s time we started really teaching our children how to have a marriage that lasts, really lasts, than to teach them to stay in a marriage that isn’t working and pretend that’s the same thing. Let’s learn from our OWN mistakes, and the mistakes of our peers, and try to teach our children to do better, and not simply to try to defy the odds out of sheer willpower.
