A postscript on family structure: One thing children lose when their parents divorce, break up, or fester in an unhappy marriage is the opportunity to learn how fighting leads to reconciliation and forgiveness.
Kids in an intact marriage learn that serious disagreements, temper outbursts, and character flaws aren’t insoluble. We learn how to apologize and adapt by watching our parents, and we can bring those skills into later relationships, both marriage and friendship. People from disrupted families and those from intact marriages where little visible effort was made on either side to improve things have, from what I can see, a much harder time struggling to hope and trust when relationships are stressed and the other person is acting badly.
Diane Sollee cites “University of Chicago research on marital happiness, analyzing data from more than 5,000 couples interviewed in the 1980s and again in the ’90s. Among couples who called their marriages unhappy in the first round but stayed together, two out of three said their marriages were happy five years later.” But if you haven’t seen that happen, it’s much harder to imagine.
Eve Tushnet 
SER 
Benjamin Nagle 
TomB 
Eve Tushnet wrote:
“One thing children lose when their parents divorce, break up, or fester in an unhappy marriage is the opportunity to learn how fighting leads to reconciliation and forgiveness.”
Wait a minute Eve, this seems to me to miss the far far greater and indeed fundamental problem of what’s gone big-time wrong with domestic relationships.
This comment of yours sort of suggests that the best solution is to somehow instill more fortitude on the part of people to stay together working out their situations.
Okay, I say, sure, great, esp. when you have a kid or kids, you damned right that fortitude ought to be there.
But, in my opinion at least, the logically prior *and* gob-smackingly better and easier to accomplish solution is persuading that … way too people are getting married way too bloody casually. (Which usually means too early.)
That … the average person’s life has just changed from 50 years ago when the norm was getting married early, and that change not surprisingly affects the marriage situation.
Now … which solution to the problem do you think is more susceptible of seeing success? And better success? (I.e., without *first* producing children?) Arguing fortitude, or for kids to stop getting married so damned casually?
Even aside from paying for the bloody gifts I’ve got to buy and lug to such weddings it makes me just wince now going to these damn things of early or even mid-20-Somethings. What in the living hell do such kids know—no matter *what* they’ve seen from their own parents—of commitments in *general,* much less the commitment they are supposedly making thereby? Of the sacrifices and burdens they are agreeing to?
How, indeed, can anyone even *expect* them to know at that age? Instead it’s like “oh, we’ll just count on a miracle occurring and they’ll get it.”
You go to enough of these things—and then of course hear of the inevitable divorces of the majority in five years or less—and no … no longer do you find it pleasant to see all the money spent on all the clothes and photographers and churches and reception halls and ice-swans and etc., and all the goofy happiness. And yes, you hit the open-bar events with an especial feeling of compensation.
But no, no longer do you find it pleasant to think about the beauty of young love. Instead you become a curmudgeon and think “Jesus, in the name and image of cheap, shallow conceptions of love—horrifyingly accompanied with the playing of some utterly pathetic pop song a la Paul Stookey—all these people including not just the couple but the parents who ought to know better and the aunts and uncles and etc. have let their brains fall out their asses.”
Not really knocking these kids at all or their parents, because young couples *are* so wonderful to see, and because to parents their kids *do* seem so grounded and wonderful and different from all others. And that’s cool. But still … yikes.
Absent extraordinary circumstances, if I had a daughter who announced she wanted to get married before she got to be age 30 I would have considered my intellectual instructing of her to have been a pretty bad failure. (Although I’m sure that in the real world, when she came to me with the news and she was only 25 I’d say “oh but she’s so much smarter than others her age I’m sure it’s okay….)
And I *would* direct most of my ire at early marriages at the parents of the young brides. *They* are the ones who are gonna suffer far more if things go the typical route (kids) and then go pear-shaped with a divorce.
That however still leaves plenty of ire—or expectation or whatever—still directed at parents and esp. fathers of too-young men wanting to get married though. Again excepting the unusually mature kid—which of course everyone thinks they have but ought to know better—instead of gay shouts of “congratulations son!,” those boys in the main ought to be damn near literally put up against the wall by their fathers: “Son, I sure hope you know what you are doing because even if you just break that girl’s heart, but especially if you have kids and then try to bail, you ain’t getting my admiration. So you better sit down and ask what the hell the great problem is in just freaking waiting for a few years.”
Marriage for marriage’s sake is meaningless, Eve. Sure, lessons can be learned from same. But it’s a helluva lot better learning it from a distance, abstractly, from others’ examples, rather than learning by putting one’s hand into the meat grinder.