Flutterby™! : 1/4 of married folks wish they weren't 2001-12-18 19:29:00+00

1/4 of married folks wish they weren't

2001-12-18 19:29:00+00 by Dan Lyke 11 comments

Occasionally, people will ask me why I'm so vehemently anti-marriage. More than a quarter of married couples in Britain responding to a new survey say that they wish they were single again.

I agree with Larry. This is a bit like the statistic that ~45% of marriages end in divorce. It's actually that ~45% of FIRST marriages end in divorce; second marriages do much better. The problem isn't marriage, its that marriage licenses are too easy to get. Maybe a mandatory waiting period is needed, like for buying a gun.

How about mandatory pre-marriage counceling from an elder-in-the-religeon-of-your-choice. Marriage is a religeous idea. Similar beliefs of the spouses should be a requirement. What am I talking about requirement? I mean "good idea" really.

Actually, looking at marriage as a religious idea would preclude the non-religious from marriage and I seem to recall that that group actually does better with maintaining a marriage.

Yeah, and more than N% of people who try to ski wish they'd never bothered. The fact that marriage doesn't work for some people, or that some people just don't like it, doesn't invalidate it for everyone.

My current take is that lots of people get married too young. If I had married when I was 22 (I'm now ~30 and just got married this year), it would have been a huge mistake no matter who it was. I'm much more grounded, self-aware, etc., and have a much better idea of what I want from relationships (both primary romantic relationships, and friendships) than I did back then.

Just as I can see how people can grow up and decide, like Dan, that marriage isn't for them, I can also see how people could grow up and decide they know what they want from marriage and then try to make that happen. It's the lack of growing up that causes the problem, I think.

In general I agree that the problem is not marriage itself but the expectations people have regarding it. I also wish that more people viewed it as a legal concept (but then I'm an anti-religious nutcase ;-).

That said, I think the concept of [traditonal] marriage is outdated and in need of a radical social overhaul. Alas, I don't see this happening in my lifetime...

(For those who will inevitably ask; I'm on my second marriage and very happy. But I don't view marriage the same way most people do. For me it is truly nothing but a slip of paper. I hang around with my wife because I like to, not because of some ceremony we were part of. Which reminds me; we wrote our own vows and they didn't include any of those silly pointless promises of a future that we couldn't possibly guarantee.)

Occasionally, people will ask me why I'm so vehemently anti-perl. More than a quarter of perl programs fail to perform as designed due to implementation mistakes.

Seriously, marriage is just folks doin' stuff(1). For those doing it right, the little legal entanglement (which can be minimized by living in a no-fault divorce state and not having kids) is irrelevant. If marriage doesn't work for you, don't do it. But some of us choose to call our long-term relationships marriages.

Giggle. I think any consensual relationship people want to enter into is just groovy. What I resent is when it becomes a societal "must", when the pressures of the culture override rational consideration of the reasons.

Marriage and having kids are both very

solidly on that side of the fence. It's not that I think people shouldn't have kids, it's not that I think marriage is necessarily bad, it's just that I've talked to too many people who've been through both who've said "If I had it to do over again..."

If both decide it is a business arrangement, then there you go. If it is for finacial security, and both are happy - great. Some base it on God, or nature, or sex, or chocolate. In my case, it was supposed to be a great friendship and it wasn't.

Actually, flushy, I think that that's a trap many people fall into, but unless the people involved have an incredibly strong sense of self, or are content with the community definition of marriage, marriage is defined by the community and the state as well. As people have noted about polyamory, when you start bringing more entities into the relationship, complexity rises as an N² function.