A few days ago, I was having an argument with my twenty-something son: he claimed that 50 % of marriages now end in divorce and that that's a recent (post 2000) phenomenon.
I said no; the divorce rate is declining. So we went online and found out I was right. In fact as of year ending 2005, 38% of marriages end in divorce.
That's encouraging, but why is it getting better? Maybe (I can only speculate) it has something to do with so many couples today living together longer and only getting married after knowing each others' habits, idiosyncracies, character defects fairly thoroughly. And maybe it's closer to something that was not so common in my own youth.
When I was growing up, we developed same sex friendships and we dated the opposite sex, but we never had a gang of friends from both sexes. Today people in their teens and early twenties have very close friends they get to know emotionally, but not necessarily sexually, and these friendships teach them valuable lessons in human nature, and in gender differences, setting the stage for a wider tolerance of each others' crimes and misdemeanors.
This tolerance is the issue I wrote about yesterday. If same sex marriage will be so much more tolerated twenty years from now, maybe opposite sex marriage will be as well. Long live marriage!
No comments:
Post a Comment