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Recently I read about this bit of research and then stumbled upon Matt’s post,  “THE COMING DIVORCE DECLINE? I’LL BELIEVE IT WHEN I SEE IT”

Ha! I get the distinct impression he doesn’t believe it! I do. I’ve been researching and observing things on the ground that lead me to conclude that divorce is indeed declining. And I think the state of marriage is actually improving over all.

So a bit of history, my own parents had a nasty divorce, huge custody battle that spanned years, and basically  engaged in a lifetime feud that nearly destroyed me. Today nearly everyone in my family is divorced, a few times over.  Nearly everyone in my husband’s family is divorced. All our friends are divorced or never got married in the first place.

I was left feeling kind of like an odd duck, believing in marriage, but marriage in my world was portrayed as a great evil, and later when I got married myself, people where speaking doom and gloom over us constantly.

I started studying marriage long ago, not in a self-help sense, but in a cultural context. What have we as a culture done to the whole concept of marriage and why? While people are certainly responsible for our individual choices, when you have an anomalie like this, something has gone awry collectively, culturally, spiritually. I needed some answers and also some reassurance. I am laughing here, but my world is so upside down and crazy, I have actually had to defend marriage, had to defend my own marriage.

So I had to figure out what I believed about marriage and why.  Am I engaging in a great evil? Promoting patriarchy? Responsible for destroying Western civilization? Shaming the ancestors? Selling out? Am I wrong to value marriage?

Those questions may sound slightly hysterical, but honestly I’ve heard them all, I’ve been accused of them all, and they were painful at the time. (That “selling out” one is humorous today, so perhaps I’ll keep it. Selling out was a angry reference to, “I hope the sex is good, you sell out.”)

So, I do not come from a world that is supportive of marriage, nor a world that tells you marriage and family are kind of like a foundational building block for our communities. I like to refer to marriage and family  as a collection of little tribes within a larger tribe. If everyone is just a rugged individualist off doing their own thing, you wind up with something more like the Wild West or a drunken frontier of chaos, and a whole lot of people living lonely and disconnected lives. Often hard, short lives. Marriage is actually good for your health.

Really ironic to me, while we as a culture are looking down on traditional marriage, shunning it, we also have this huge gay marriage movement trying to portray marriage as so important it is like, a basic human right. I just cannot reconcile that contradiction of narratives. It makes no sense to me. Marriage is between a man and a woman.

I needed to understand so I could forgive, too. I was literally born into this raging storm and on the front lines of the divorce wars. In the process I actually met other people like me, and many younger too, basically the children of boomer parents who had seen a whole lot of divorce and broken families as children and we wanted something different.

So the sexual revolution, feminism, huge cultural shifts, the economy, and a really self focused generation, did a lot of damage to relationships in general and to the institution of marriage itself. So too did a lot of marriages in name only, or faith based marriages rooted in hypocrisy.

Those of us on the outside looking in weren’t sure which was worse, to keep chasing the idealism of marriage through five divorces or to just make a mockery of marriage by remaining married in name only while living out your real values on the down low. Either way, we didn’t have a lot of reasons to believe and trust in much of anything.

Many of us chased the idealism anyway, insisted on believing in something we could not really see reflected in the culture around us. Love Hebrews 11:1, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

Facts don’t always tell the whole story. Sometimes the truth is not  something you can see, but something you simply have to believe until the evidence and substance comes to light. That much lauded and passed around urban legend, the divorce statistic that says, “half of all marriages end in divorce,” has been debunked six ways past Sunday, but it still permeates the narrative today. Higher divorce rates are actually generational and cultural. There are specific demographics that drive those numbers up. The divorce statistics for your own age group may be more like, 12 percent.

It’s a messy journey and we people are deeply flawed, far from perfect, so we’re bound to get it wrong, early and often, but over all, yes, I think there is hope on the horizon.

 

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