DW Community Catch-up Thread
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@Ale I actually think that a lot of the people who hold their lives out like that on social media are often the ones who are the most insecure. The perfect lives they put out there on Facebook are to convince everyone — possibly even themselves — that they’re as happy as they say they are.
Also, there are bound to be surprises if you marry someone after knowing them for six months…
I’ve had a lot of friends from high school and college who married young and seem to be doing well, with the exception of one.
As an adult living in a large city, most of my friends now, including myself, have waited later to get married and start their families. They’ve all picked good, caring guys. I don’t think they are just FB happy either. We meet up often and you can tell each deeply respects the other.
Anyway, don’t be afraid of marriage. But also don’t get married for the wrong reasons. Rushing it and getting married because you feel like time is running out are def wrong reasons. Or staying with someone because you’re scared. Not good.
My fiancé was married before. He tells me soon after he was engaged, he knew it was wrong but didn’t call off the wedding. They divorced shortly after. It was a get married because all his friends were type of thing and they had been together awhile.
I actually only have one friend who is married and she seems really happy. All of my other 30-something friends are single. Not really in relationships, either.
I found these stats a while ago, though. I haven’t done a ton of research to see how accurate everything is, but apparently the divorce rate in the U.S. has dropped to a 40-year low:
• The U.S. divorce rate dropped for the third year in a row, reaching its lowest point in nearly 40 years, according to the National Center for Family and Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University.
• Marriage rates, on the other hand, increased last year – is the highest number of marriages since 2009, which suggests that marriage rates may be stabilizing after decades of decline.
• While the overall National Average is apparently around 45% divorce rate, that includes second and third marriages (which are much more likely to fail), people getting married in their teens and early 20’s (which are much more likely to fail), people living in poverty, etc.
• However, those who wait until their 30’s for a first marriage, who date at least two years and who have a household income over $100,000 only have something like around 10-15% divorce rate.
Another stat:
• Despite the myths you might have heard, half of American first marriages don’t end in divorce. In reality, about a third do, down from the divorce surge of the 1970s and 1980s, though second and third marriages are much more vulnerable. Recent marriages are doing particularly well thus far: Just 15 percent of the Americans who tied the knot since 2000 have decided to get it undone within the first eight years of marriage.
Marriage rate is a tricky indicator because it depends a lot on the size of the likely to marry age cohort relative to the general population.
I barely passed my Statistics class in college so I’m probably not the right person to be discussing this lol.
I will add that there are more resources available than there ever have been. I think of the resources that have helped me and my wife, with a lot of work, to have a happy marriage, and they would have been a lot harder to find (or much less socially acceptable) 30 years ago, if not absent altogether.
Yeah, before, you had the church, and expensive marriage counseling you probably had to pay for.
Here’s the thing: your crazy, whatever it is, will not go away when you get married, just because a person has now made a commitment to you. It’s all still right there, and so is theirs. And if it’s not a great match, you will start aggravating the shit out of each other. You have to find someone who can work with your crazy and vice versa, and even maybe help heal some of it, and that’s not real easy to find.
Not just the cost of marriage counseling but I think its perception. People were much less open to it.
Someone once said (not as an anti marriage statement) that dating is a war game simulation. You fight the battle part of the time and then turn it off and go home. Marriage is the war.
Statistics aren’t causation. I think it’s always a gamble, and some people stay miserably married. If I’d gotten married in my 20s, I think I would’ve taken the decision to marry someone way more casually than I would now. It took a bad break-up and a friend telling me in the aftermath how thankful I should be that things ended because marriage is the only time you get to pick your family to truly understand that marriage is a big choice. I recently admitted this to a friend of mine who is unhappily married, and she told me that she felt fairly casually about marriage when she got married at 27. Now she’s 30, she’s been married for 3.5 years, and separated for about 1.5 years. This wasn’t their first separation, it’s just been the longest one. She chose badly because of external pressures, and it seems like she knows this now.
An ex of mine was married before we dated. He got engaged on an ultimatum. His wife cheated on him and left him for a woman five years into their marriage. He admitted to me that he wasn’t ready to get married, felt a lot of pressure to propose, and was never happy while he was married. But he said he never would’ve left the marriage. He, too, picked poorly.
Hopefully through dating and relationships and even the shitty heartbreak, you’re getting better at picking out what it is you need and what you don’t. But I don’t think it’s ever possible to KNOW your marriage will be a happy one forever and ever and ever.
I was just talking to a friend last night about this: my parents have been married for over 40 years. Their marriage has been through a lot that would break most people’s, including an incredibly sick child (me) and several other really rough things. I can count at least four things I know of that alone would have given no one pause to end a marriage, much less all put together. Then last year, my dad went through some health issues that caused him to really push my mom away and I legit thought they were going to separate, but they didn’t. She clung on and now they are doing somewhat better. Even so, I wonder sometimes if it’s by sheer fear/stubbornness/something bordering on complacency that they stay together…and if that’s healthy.
The funny thing is that my mom never thinks any guy is good enough for me or my sister and is always telling us to “kick him to the curb.” While she may be right, HER mother told her that about my dad 40-odd years ago, haha.
