The other 50% end in death.

Cheery little soul today, I see :)


We celebrate 49 years of marriage later this year...still happy.

"Cheery little soul today, I see :)
We celebrate 49 years of marriage later this year...still happy."

DAVE IS RIGHT

i could still be happily married today after 51 years had i been able or willing to put up with a lot of unacceptable things. and i would have had a lot of security.

how much have you had to put up with or just turn a blind eye to things?

If someone is happy after 49 years of marriage I say Mazel Tov !

That's damn lucky and a lot of hard work !

Some couples are more compatible than others. Simply put, if it isn't broken don't fix it.

You know..it really hasn't felt like hard work..I have enjoyed all our years together. In fact I have to remind myself just how long we have been married because it just doesn't feel that long.

Of course we haven't always agreed about everything but we talk out issues and try to see each other's point of view. Sometimes we agree to disagree ...

I haven't had to put up with anything. I'm assuming he feels he hasn't had to put up with anything from me either. Neither of us has turned a blind eye to anything...I certainly haven't needed to.

Many, many marriages are happy. We aren't unique and in our family my sister has been very happily married for 44 years and my OH's two sisters for 43 years and 32 years. Yes, their husbands would all agree they are happy.

I didn't have to put up with anything either until after I found out he had been cheating from the beginning. Nice guy lied and hid things from me for 20 years After 30 years still dealing with the emotional damage to the kids and me. Awful to trust and be betrayed.

One thing that skews the data is that all marriages are thrown together. A great many of the "50%" are 2nd and subsequent marriages. We humans love our mistakes so much we keep repeating them!

"Love is blind. Marriage is an eye-opener." (attributed to many)
"A man is incomplete until he's married. And then he's finished." (ZaZa Gabor)
"The proper basis for marriage is a mutual misunderstanding." Oscar Wilde.

And, to make this thread RfM relevant:
"Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same." (Oscar Wilde)

80% of divorced people marry again. So it's really that 50% marry the wrong person.

Yeah, but 2/3 of them will get divorced again. Not too great on the rebound success rate IMO.

"BIGAMY, n. A mistake in taste for which the wisdom of the future will adjudge a punishment called trigamy."
Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" [1881-1906]

"Women! You can't live with them and you can't live with them!!"
-- Peristalsis, the most under rated of the ancient Greek philosophers

Pompous Windbag Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> "Women! You can't live with them and you can't
> live with them!!"
> -- Peristalsis, the most under rated of the
> ancient Greek philosophers

And... "You can't live with 'em and you can't kill 'em."

Movie... "True lies"

Married men shouldn’t own guns due to suicide risk.

or having the gun used against them... either way it is very dangerous to the man.

I'm definitely staying married for the kids... anyone else here?

My parents tried that, until they finally divorced after 21 years of marriage when I was 16.

It was better in the long run, but their finances definitely took a hit. And all their Mormon "friends" they thought they had disappeared from view.

My TBM parents did that too. My youngest sibling was 18 at the time, and they already had been living apart for a number of years.
They are both remarried and appear happier the 2nd time around (probably due to no kids and both sides have jobs and savings).

2nd and more marriages beyond the first marriage have a higher divorce rate than 50%. It's more like 2/3.

To love is to be vulnerable. It's risky business.

if marriages are down so are divorce rates. if everyone married all the people they shacked up with the rate would be higher. how many people do you know that have kids by multiple partners? lots of half siblings sometimes with the mother's surname.

I guess so. But the funny thing is the 50 percent is false.

No... if marriages are down, the number of divorces are down. The rate (whatever it is) could remain the same.

The number one cause of divorce is marriage.

Did anyone measure the statistics for the cause of death?

The leading cause of death is birth.

Oh I meant in marriage when the other 50% didn't divorce ended in death.

Was it death by natural causes? Or murder?

:D

Would you rather end your marriage by divorce or end it by death ?

If you're happily married wouldn't you want to stay married until death do you part?

Most people don't get married thinking they're going to get divorced. They want to believe that they're going to go the distance. Until the bottom drops out and all hell breaks loose.

The average duration of a marriage is 6 years.

My TBM marriage lasted 15 years, so is that considered a "more successful than average" marriage?

My marriage stayed together, because I was happy and appreciative and very gullible. AFTER my husband abandoned me and our children, two years passed before I found out that he had been cheating on me since our honeymoon. The last months of our marriage, he was beginning to be abusive, so I was glad he left. So were the kids. We struggled financially for a few years, but we never wanted him back.

I would just laugh, whenever Mormons would start preaching to me about finding another faithful Mormon father for my children. They would often try to set me up. I tried to explain to them how much happier the children and I were without a man ruling over us, but the Mormons didn't understand.

Studies show that single women are happier than married women, by far. Single women are happiest, next-happiest are married men, next-happiest are single men, and last are married women.

Marriage is a win-win! Get married, and if it works out, you can be happy. If the marriage ends, you can still be happy. That's a risk worth taking. The trick is knowing when and how to get back to being single again, when you need to be.

I'm happily single.

After being raised Mormon with that expectation to get married have lots of babies and be a SAHM, well that went the by and by long ago.

My children are my life. But now they are grown up I have a life of my own again. It's nice to be able to plan my future accordingly.

An ex-boyfriend keeps trying to hook me up to dating sites like he's been on for the past umpteen years. I feel like asking "How's that been working for him?" He's an online dating addict. (A hoarder in real life - I didn't know about until we met in person. I could have dealt with that easier than his hoarding women lol.)

I've been married for almost eleven years. In some ways the time has flown. In other ways, it seems like we've always been together and the children have always been with us.

If it were necessary, I would probably try to stick it out for the sake of the children if we could be civil about it. Fortunately, I have no need for such a thing. I can't imagine life without my wife. I hope she feels the same way about me, but I don't speak for her.

Sometimes second marriages last. I have been my husband's second wife for over sixteen years and I guarantee he's much better off and happier than he was with his first wife. I think ours will be a marriage that ends in death; but then, my husband is truly amazing.

My parents were married for 56 years, until my dad passed in 2014. They definitely could have divorced, since my dad was an alcoholic and my mom wasn't inclined to put up with a lot of his crap. But they stuck it out, and now my mom seems a lot happier.

My parents last marriage for each of them after their divorce from each other was the best one for them.

Mom and dad were opposites. Since 'opposites attract,' that may be why they were drawn to each other. Following their divorce and subsequent remarriages, their respective spouses were more like each of my parents than they were different. I believe that's why they were ultimately happier with my step-mom and step-dad than they were with each other.

I think my husband and his ex wife got married for all the wrong reasons. She was looking for a better meal ticket and he wanted to "save" her and never thought any other women would find him attractive (and boy, was he wrong about that!).

That reminds me of a friend's story of her first marriage. She saw a yellow Corvette when she was a teenager and really liked it. "Someday I'm going to marry a man with a yellow Corvette." And she did. "It wasn't a good reason to marry, but he married me for my boobs, so at least we were equally shallow."

My parents never divorced. Mom was several years younger than Dad, and women tend to live longer anyway, so Mom was looking forward to outliving Dad so she could finally live the way she wanted. Dad wasn't awful, just someone whose self-absorption and lack of interest in anything outside the church or his job was stifling. Mom was very upset when she came down with cancer and realized she was going to die before Dad and not get her freedom years.

In contrast, I have friends who both had two failed marriages when they met. They've been together for 36 years so far -- not because they feel obliged to stay together in order to protect the institution of marriage, but because they WANT to stay together, because they enjoy each other, because they're right for each other, because they love each other in a mature way that was learned from the mistakes of their previous marriages. Neither is enduring to the end, hope for freedom afterward.

To me it's strange that our predominant (for the moment) culture expects people to do something they've never done before, and do it with no practice, and be 100% successful at it. Sure, some people marry and stay married the rest of their life, and if you can do that, great! But some people need a practice marriage. Some need to discover the differences between the fantasy of marriage and the reality of it. Some need to find out they just can't do the marriage thing. I think the expectation that 100% of adults should be married is stupid. And "staying married for the kids?" Yeah, right, let them grow up observing and modeling a dysfunctional or even abusive relationship. "Dad beat Mom, and Mom cheated on Dad, and they yelled at each other all the time, but that must be okay because they stayed together."

Whatever the actual divorce rate, I'd like to see the numbers on people who are happier because they got out of a bad marriage.

Some people shouldn't marry or have children. I might be one of those people...

The family is the most important unit in time and in eternity and, as such, transcends every other interest in life.5
The Church has the responsibility—and the authority—to preserve and protect the family as the foundation of society. The pattern for family life, instituted from before the foundation of the world, provides for children to be born to and nurtured by a father and mother who are husband and wife, lawfully married. Parenthood is a sacred obligation and privilege, with children welcomed as a “heritage of the Lord” (Ps. 127:3).
A worried society now begins to see that the disintegration of the family brings upon the world the calamities foretold by the prophets. The world’s councils and deliberations will succeed only when they define the family as the Lord has revealed it to be. “Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it” (Ps. 127:1).6

teachings-of-presidents-of-the-church-howard-w-hunter/chapter-17-preserve-and-protect-the-family?lang=eng

Isn’t this the same church that had to abandon polygamy under threat of government force and then practiced it illegally with a wink and a nod for decades afterward? Even today Mormons look forward to polygamy in heaven. They don’t even know what century they’re in.

All polygamous societies studied are violent and generally bad for children. With Briggy it was barons and serfs. Guess who got the wives. Come to Zion with your pretty wife, what could go wrong?

babyloncansuckit Wrote:
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> All polygamous societies studied are violent and
> generally bad for children.

Where women are viewed as breeding machines and traded and acquired by men.

I look like a little old mormon lady (not so old looking), but I have a whole new audience finding out the truth about me, the other workers at Sam's Club. Many of them are college students and some are so-so mormons. They all tend to drink coffee. I find that funny actually. .

But it blows their minds that I'm still married to my gay husband. It will be how long? We got married in 1984. He lives here. I have a boyfriend of 14 years. I don't plan to divorce and I don't plan to remarry. I know the statistics for second marriages. My boyfriend and I get along a lot better if we don't share the same home. Tried it twice. My boyfriend knows my ex isn't any kind of "threat," but more of a plus as he pays the house payment right now and he gives me good insurance--better than my boyfriend can offer me if I married him. We don't have to separate the "money" or the house and the kids can inherit it all without involving lawyers to settle the divorce. As my therapist says, "If it works, don't mess with it."

I met another gay man at work who also got married in the 1980s. His reply to a question was "I lived in Utah. I was mormon. It is what everyone did, it was what they told us to do--get married."

My sister says that she is the only one who got married in the temple and is still married and I had to remind her.

I see the statistics. I was also married (really married) for a while. I'll NEVER give over my power to a man again and I also won't ever let a man tell me how I can spend my money. He is not allowed to be involved at all.

It works for me.

My parents were married for a long time. Good times and bad. They argued A LOT. I wasn't so sure how much they loved each other. I wondered when I was a child if they would get a divroce. Sundays were their arguing days. A lot of it had to do with how much my dad attended church. They would have argued less without religion involved. BUT in the last years of their lives, I saw how much they loved each other. My dad was inconsolable when my mother died. She told my aunt she had to die first as she couldn't live without him (for some obvious reasons as they have 2 disabled sons). My dad died 2 months later.

And that’s not counting the miserable marriages that never divorce.

+1
Well said.

Marriage is a cult and a scam.

Sure, you can be married and happy, but you could have been without being married.

Like the morg, the whole thing is based on fantasy. Somehow you can just promise to love each other forever and voila, it will happen, even when hormones fade and interests change over time.

And somehow you think you will get free stuff, like sex and money or home repairs or cooking, or whatever. Then you find out you have to do things to earn that, or they aren't interested.

The fantasy starts with the wedding. How many billions are spent every year on an absolutely useless exercise.

My SIL had some money while working in Alaska. Spent $35,000 on the wedding to his first wife in his early twenties, and it lasted 1.5 years until she was screwing another guy. He married my daughter 4 years ago at a place that charged $100, and they're doing fine.

But don't tell that to the wedding industry.

Along with them, there is the multi-billion dollar divorce industry (counselors, lawyers, judges, courts, etc).

Yep, impossible to love each other without that.

I noted above the idea that married women are the least happy. That is what I have observed. Simply because they view their man as a man views his job - a source of income. And most men don't like their jobs either, and are looking for something better, or looking forward to retirement (or for the wife, when hubby dies).

I've heard so many comments from women relatives over the years, including my mom, about their husbands, who are oblivious to how their wives really feel about them. At least until some of them were served divorce papers.

Much of this became clear after I was threatened with divorce when having problems with church and making money. Still married after 35 years, but the fantasy is long gone.

Funny how many will support one fantasy while bashing another (morg). They are all big lies.

BTW, Karen Straughan explains how the system of marriage allows men's lives to be destroyed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rn41YTnCRDQ

And Dr. Helen Smith explains why men are avoiding marriage more often.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Klx1cfV-8b4

Free Man Wrote:
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> The fantasy starts with the wedding.

I think it starts WAY before that, in childhood.

"Much of this became clear after I was threatened with divorce when having problems with church and making money. Still married after 35 years, but the fantasy is long gone."

I feel so sorry for your wife, Free Man.