I have been fairly lucky in that I haven’t seen a lot of divorce in my life. My parents have a great relationship that they have been working on their whole marriage and as such I haven’t given that much thought to divorce so this week has been a lot of new information for me. I thought there were some interesting points in the State of Our Unions from 2012. Over the last few decades the amount of divorces have gone up but also the amount of people who never get married have gone up. I grew up in a small fairly consverative part of california and so most of the people that I grew up with had plans of getting married. We had our share of high school pregnancies but even so most of them got married soon after high school either too the father of their child or to someone else.
After moving to LA and especially in the entertainment community that I found myself in there were a lot more of the trends that this article was talking about. People cohabiting without any plans to get married which was really a culture shock to me. How can you have a long term plan with someone and not have marriage as part of that plan? With one particular friend his parents had a messy divorce and so he had made it clear to his current girlfriend that he didn’t ever want to get married. They just celebrated 7 years together and own a house together and still no plans to be married. As opposed to myself, I’ve known my wife for just over 2 years and we have been married for a year already.
If you decide to have children while not married you face a higher chance of breaking up because it’s simpler to end things when you haven’t made the commitments you make in a marriage and when you don’t need to involve lawyers. From a parents perspective this seems like an easier prospect in case things fall apart, but from a child’s perspective this means that it can end at any time and there is nothing holding their family together. This can make a child have more stress and could cause them to have similar issues that they would have if their parents had a divorce. Such as struggling in school and misbehaving.
Overall, I think that marriage is a personal choice and depends on everyone’s individual experiences, and that having incentives for getting married will put more of a strain on the idea of marriage. But if you plan to have a family and live together then it would be better for your relationship to be married.
My Class Blog 