In short, the world was a hostile place, and leaving your husband to start again would have been nigh on impossible for many women. So yes, they stuck out their marriages, but for what reason and at what cost?
Some marriages are not meant to last. I hope very much that mine won’t be one of them. I’m going into my marriage expecting to have to work at it, to keep the magic alive. But unlike older generations, who favoured shorter courtships and rarely lived together before tying the knot, I know what I’m getting into
We’ve lived together for three years. We’ve weathered financial difficulties and mental health issues. We’ve fought, and made up, and fought some more. We’ve gone from having sex three times a day to sometimes only managing it three times in a week.
We allow ourselves flexibility in so many other areas of our lives. Your career in market research wasn’t a failure because you later decided to retrain as a teacher. Living in South wasn’t a failure because eventually, you relocated
Length is not the only measure of a marriage’s success.
It’s far braver to recognise that a relationship has stopped making you both into better people and move on, than it is to stick at it. Yes, being married is a wonderful, admirable thing, but is it really worth sacrificing your happiness for the pleasure that comes from a ‘Happy 20th wedding anniversary’ card
I’m not a quitter. I don’t give up easily.
But if my marriage doesn’t stay the course, it won’t be because I’ve given up, it will be because we’ve recognised that something can be amazing for a part of your life by not suited to the whole of it, and I completely refuse to call that a failure.
It would only be a failure if we had ended up stuck together, miserable because we’re trying to prove to the rest of the world that we can do it.
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You've hit upon several points and I agree that favoring longevity without considering other factors could lead to a situation where one or both parties end up unfulfilled or worse, in a neglectful or abusive relationship. Society tends to view marriage as a way to start a family, or what people do when they "fall in love" when there could be other reasons. Many couples, straight or gay, have no intention of having children, and some may not be "in love" as popularly imagined, or it may be a voluntary"sexless marriage" or a sexually open relationship, whatever that implies. The core of marriage seems to be a commitment to care for one another, to provide a stable interpersonal connection, and a desire to prioritize our partners needs over the needs of others (within reason and certainly as defined by the couple).
Every marriage will have disagreements, if not, there is likely some type of coercion or at least deference which may be intentional and freely offered. When a marriage (or any relationship) gets to the point where arguing and fighting become common rather than rare, it there's a good probability it may be best to question staying together, especially if there the same issues keep causing problems and no one is willing to change. And that's not a sign of failure, it's an indication of "irreconcilable differences" that may or may not have been present all along or evolved over time.
There are two axioms I feel are true. One is that arguing and are choice; neither are necessary to solve a disagreement. The other is that a good relationship can go bad, but a bad one rarely gets better. It's possible to "save" a marriage if both want to, but it's not assured and that is the "work" part of marriage people often cite. If navigating each other's habits, preferences, idiosyncracies, and the like feels like work, maybe expectations are misplaced. Typically it takes some time to understand and accept that those things aren't that malleable and if our partner never puts the dishes back in the same place when emptying the dishwasher, they probably never will regardless of how many times we complain about it. We should either be thankful they're emptying the dishwasher at all or if not, we do it ourselves and keep rolling with the punches.
My ex and I made it to forty years before she decided it was time to end things...
Isn't it a great thing. Have a nice day
If you’ve read anything I’ve written in the last few months, you’ll know that I’m about to get married.
And yes, it’s all very exciting and no, I can’t wait to be married, but there’s something else I’m really looking forward to ditching, and that’s the unsolicited marital advice.
‘Marriage is hard work’ older people keep telling me. ‘You have to work at it.’
Is it? Really? Is marriage not one continuous stream of oral sex, beach holidays and Richard style dinner parties
The worst, of course, is when someone utters that immortal line, ‘In my generation we didn’t sell the house just because the light bulb was broken.’
(It’s hard at that point not to start screaming, ‘I wouldn’t know anything about selling houses because your generation bought them all for about five quid and we’ve got nothing.&rsquo
It’s true, divorce rates are higher than they used to be. Fewer people stay married for life. But I refuse to believe that this longevity is because older generations were inherently better at marriage than we are.
To start with, we’re living longer and women don’t have the same likelihood of dying in childbirth. So the chances of staying married until you were both 85 are probably roughly the same now as they ever were, only we get divorced rather than dying these days
Additionally, women who stayed in difficult marriages might well have been staying for much darker reasons than just sticking power.
Giving up work when you got engaged, or at the very least when you had a baby, was an uncontestable fact of life for many women of my grandparent’s generation.
With no financial independence, no job prospects and harsh custody laws, women were literally trapped in their marriages.