asprilla

nice one.

morrisj3

Very true.....

Deancm

For every two couples that get married, one gets divorced. That's a fact. Extra marital affairs are so common it's not funny. Some people may be happy with one person for the rest of their lives however there are also lots of people that are not. the facts speak for themselves.

I didn't portray any people as drones although people do have a herd mentality and are relatively easy to control. The fact is you can't argue with nature and yet the human ego *thinks* it can change our natural instinct. If we were meant to be with one person until death do us part, nobody would be having affairs. My point of view has been scientifically proven whereas yours is nothing more than idealism and wishful thinking. You are quite free to believe what you will though, live and let live and all that.

TiddlyPom

It doesn't make marriage flawed... it makes the people flawed.

I have been married and am now divorced, yet I am not cynical about marriage or anti marriage. I think it *can* work if only the groundwork is there in the first place.

For every two couples who get married, one stays married. I think those numbers speak for themselves.

LouiseR

Exactly.

Deancm

One stays married, one gets divorced. We're talking semantics there. That's a 50:50 chance of it being a success. Would you go to the casino and put your life savings on a roulette table with those odds?

DunRoaminTheUK

The correct name for your condition is 'pessimism dressed up as realism', me thinks?

Deancm

I prefer to call it being sensible.

Always better to look before you leap... With marriage that is very rarely the case.

TiddlyPom

I do like a little flutter here and there. Prefer the horses though. Roulette's so very... 007.

We are talking semantics...yes, but only because you were the one who bought it up. As a statistic, it's pretty good. A 50/50 chance..I'd gamble with those odds, and I have done once.

Deancm

There's actually far better odds with Russian Roulette! I only gamble if I know I am going to win.

50:50 is pretty good odds? Would you bet your life on that?

TiddlyPom

Actually, that's not true. Divorces were granted but usually only to men. They were the ones who divorced their wives but it was a highly expensive procedure.

After 1858, divorce became more accessible. If you've read the 'Mayor of Casterbridge' Michael Henchard disposes of his wife by 'leading' her on a halter to a public place and selling her. This was how divorce was done back then before more stringent law was introduced.
Bigamy was considered the 'poor man's divorce'... just having more than one wife was normal because he couldn't afford the divorce. It wasn't that it didn't happen... just that stats weren't recorded properly and people rarely spoke about it.

If you go back as far as ancient Rome, divorce was rampant. More than just your 'three generations' of acceptability. If you read Gibbons' 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire', he sites the decline in family as one of the reasons for the fall. Women's ages were not always noted in Roman times, but rather the amount of marriages they'd had!

TiddlyPom

You can never 'know' you are going to win. Ergo, you never gamble.

Having nearly lost my life once, with much worse odds of survival, then, hmmm, yes, why not.

TiddlyPom

I can hear you googling Dean.

Burbage

Marriage is flawed, and the divorce laws are flawed. You aren't cynical about marriage because the laws favour women and they penalise men. From your point of view you're winning more with every divorce.

There are certainly people of both sexes who cannot cope with living alone. That doesn't mean marriage is necessarily the answer. But the flaw in marriage is that it expects total commitment and it is supposed to last forever. If two people live together for a short while in Australia, marriage is forced on them, even if they don't want it. Now with same sex marriages coming in, I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't forced on two people of the same sex living together even if they are heterosexual.

DunRoaminTheUK

This does suck. I agree.