An article was posted on CNN.com about children of divorce and their determination to stay married. Statistics show that if one person in a marriage is a child of divorce, the chances are 50% higher that the marriage will end in divorce, and 200% higher if both spouses are children of divorce.
The article makes it sound like all of these people were wronged by their flaky parents who got married and divorced for frivolous reasons.
There's absolutely no mention of anybody LEARNING anything from their parents' divorce, instead of just railing against it.
I wrote a letter to my mother almost two decades after her divorce, because I felt badly about the way I acted towards her when I was a teenager. I used to make her feel like all her problems were the result of her choosing to divorce my father. Like some of the people in the article, I wanted every issue I had with relationships to be the fault of my "broken home."
In reality, I would have had those same problems even if my parents had stayed married. They may have even been worse, because I would have come from a home full of screaming and arguing rather than a home with a loving mom, who had the guts to leave a husband even though she wasn't sure she could make it without him.
What I learned from my Mom's divorce is that marriage, like anything, is a crapshoot. You can be more sure of the person you're going to marry than anyone you've ever met in your life, and two years later they can turn into a totally different person than the one you agreed to spend the rest of your life with.
I learned that every relationship is a contract, and no contract should be kept in place if one person isn't holding up their end of the deal.
Yes, I definitely am a little bit more cautious when it comes to thinking about getting married, but shouldn't everybody be?
I think instead of chastising the previous generation for making divorce for socially acceptable, we should be applauding them for making it easier for us to change our lives when we find ourselves trapped in an unhappy situation.
There's a line from the Clare Boothe Luce play "The Women" where the elderly mother scolds her daughter for not staying with her cheating husband. She said when she was young "they made the best of things."
Looking back on my childhood, and knowing what I know now about my father, I can tell you there would have been no "best of things." My mother made the right choice, and in doing so, she taught me a lot about courage.
Yes, a divorce may make children scared to get married, but not as much so as seeing their two parents live and die in an unhappy marriage.
The article makes it sound like all of these people were wronged by their flaky parents who got married and divorced for frivolous reasons.
There's absolutely no mention of anybody LEARNING anything from their parents' divorce, instead of just railing against it.
I wrote a letter to my mother almost two decades after her divorce, because I felt badly about the way I acted towards her when I was a teenager. I used to make her feel like all her problems were the result of her choosing to divorce my father. Like some of the people in the article, I wanted every issue I had with relationships to be the fault of my "broken home."
In reality, I would have had those same problems even if my parents had stayed married. They may have even been worse, because I would have come from a home full of screaming and arguing rather than a home with a loving mom, who had the guts to leave a husband even though she wasn't sure she could make it without him.
What I learned from my Mom's divorce is that marriage, like anything, is a crapshoot. You can be more sure of the person you're going to marry than anyone you've ever met in your life, and two years later they can turn into a totally different person than the one you agreed to spend the rest of your life with.
I learned that every relationship is a contract, and no contract should be kept in place if one person isn't holding up their end of the deal.
Yes, I definitely am a little bit more cautious when it comes to thinking about getting married, but shouldn't everybody be?
I think instead of chastising the previous generation for making divorce for socially acceptable, we should be applauding them for making it easier for us to change our lives when we find ourselves trapped in an unhappy situation.
There's a line from the Clare Boothe Luce play "The Women" where the elderly mother scolds her daughter for not staying with her cheating husband. She said when she was young "they made the best of things."
Looking back on my childhood, and knowing what I know now about my father, I can tell you there would have been no "best of things." My mother made the right choice, and in doing so, she taught me a lot about courage.
Yes, a divorce may make children scared to get married, but not as much so as seeing their two parents live and die in an unhappy marriage.
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