quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If what you say is true, then how come people divorce so much?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Excessive expectations.
Everyone believes they are super special. Women in the 18-26 year bracket have these HUGE expectations that no man can fulfill! They get married at, say, twenty two. After a couple of years, they get BORED and/or realize that marriage is not some magical process of transcendence. She sees other women her age out having fun but she is stuck with responsibilities. Oh, if she could only shrug off the husband and be single again!
Unhealthy romance: the pursuit of the lover.
Healthy romance: the presence of the lover.
It is almost a cult to many of these women (and some men!). These excessive expectations contains neither the friendship or civility that makes marriage successful. It fulfills the way a drug fulfills, requiring new infusions to sustain the high. We've raised their romanticism so much that its taken to be a personal and cultural panacea, a solve for everything. But not one thing solves everything. So they suffer the permanent disappointment of these excessive expectations. Twenty years of affection, caring, friendship, the small favors husbands and wives do for each other, is seen as 'boring' to these cultists. But in my opinion, it is far more and greater than their stupid expectations.
An obituary ought to be written. It'll be its tombstone when we bury this out of control romanticism for good.
I truly think there are also other factors at work and will try a stab at this now:
1) Hollywood, like all businesses, is out to make money. They only make movies that they think people WANT to see, even if it is perpetuating the hopeless dreams of everyone of us. That's what's known as entertainment. As you grow older - and wiser - you will see all these "feel good" movies for what they are - TRASH.
2) I believe that every relationship suffers from the "comparison" complex, and together with man's inherent strive for power and status, most of us are never (or ever for that matter) satisfied with that we have. A divorce could just happen simply because the other partner has "found someone better" (to put it bluntly). And I've known this to happen in quite a few cases. Yes, I suppose it is projection of one partner onto another and a kind of expectation to the kind of status he will achieve and when he doesn't achieve that she finds someone else . . . Or it could be that the husband slowly begins to find his wife less and less physically attractive and decides to get a younger model, and so on . . . A case in point is the actress Kate Winslet. Her former husband has never attained her success and status and it is probably that this created a huge rift between them. Look at her now, she's with someone who about the same level of status as her.
3) People grow apart. As "The Unknown Don" says, you cannot really tell if the wonderful person you are marrying will turn into your enemy a few years down the line, it just a question of luck. You also can't prevent accidents or illness that could put a strain on the partnership from breaking it up
4) one of them have done something unforgivable. Most likely having an affair to feel young again etc. . and the other partner starts to have venament hate slowly overflow in them.
5) This explaination is not going to be a popular one: It could simple be a natural state of things that when you have such a wealthy captialist country (like America and Britain) and as we get more and more crowded (along with booming economic trends) that divorce rates are just going to rise because that's the nature of the system. I know this sounds downright defeatist, but we might have to swallow our pride and accept that this just might be the case. People want more and they start to expect more because our economy has made that possible. We start becoming more and more dehumanised as we strive for power and status in our various careers, leaving us precious little for our partners.
Pook, I am of the brutal view that man is just a prisoner to his wants and needs. I also believe that he can transcend this but only through brutally being honest with himself and being able to face the beast from within. I can't put this into words but one books illustrates what I am talking about beautifully: "Housekeeping" by Marilynne Robinson. A beautiful heartbreaking tour de force of a novel.
