Dave,
As per divorce, we have to accept the changing reality of the world we live in. A couple of interesting sociological and biological changes have had and will continue to have impacts on the social institution we know as marriage.
1880: lifespans were fairly short (maybe 50 and 55), life itself was fairly difficult (12 hour workdays, 6 day workweeks) and the "infant/juvenile period" of homo sapiens (that is, the period between birth and economic adulthood) was somewhere between 15 and 17 years. Males were expected to do a man's job at 15, often beginning at 11 or 12 as an apprentice. They were real adults at 18 or 19 and often married in their early 20s. They were often inexperienced in sex but very experienced in the responsibilities of the world. Life was hard, and if an average lifespan was 50, that meant quite a few were departing in their late thirties or early forties. Social life was fairly limited (family outings, life in the working class neighborhood or family farm). People who had been married 20 years first of all got married when they were full adults, not juveniles, had lower expectations, generally were worn out by factory work and appliance-less house work, and were less distractable (they didn't meet other more interesting people on Carnival Cruise trips).
2005: Lifespans are expanding, but the infancy/juvenile period is now sometimes as long as 30 years, long past sexual maturity, experimentation and cohabitation. The truth is, even if two 24-year olds meet and marry, and have children, from a sociological point of view they are still juveniles, immature, incomplete. When they finally reach sociological maturity (when Ben gets his PhD or when Carla gets out of law school) they may find that the spouse they are married to is not the right spouse for whom they have become, with maturity. So, of course they should get divorced--not to get divorced would be failure, getting a divorce would be a sign of maturity, to me.
There is also the idea that a majority of marriages, even if they are "good" marriages, may only have a productive cycle of 20-25 years. People mature, people change. In the 1880s, this wasn't a problem. Joe and Mary married at 22, 25 years later Joe was dead and Mary wasn't looking too good, either, not with all that soap making and boiling clothing, all the stress from diseases (2 kids lost to childbirth diseases, one lost to tuberculosis and another to the flu epidemic, leaving them only 5 kids alive) and poverty. Divorce never even came up.
For Ben and Carla at 55, after 25 or 30 years of marriage, they may both have the economic wherewithal and good health and vitality to continue life in a different direction.
For people who are sexually active as teenagers, still immature at 28 or 29, and expect to live to their 80s, divorce is not a surprise at all. This is the modern reality.
Kb |
