With cold and snow still dominating the landscape for at least another month it gives a person a great deal of time to think about this and that. Today is the day for marriage to be thought about and examined. I like millions of others have been married and divorced and suffered with the accompanying emotional damage.  Nineteen years of memories I would love to remove from my memory banks except for a few months of actual happiness.

I was raised by parents who dated from when they were in their teens.  They lived a few blocks from each other and were inseparable as teens until my father enlisted in the Navy during WW II.  I always thought their marriage was a happy one because we (my sister and I) were protected from certain things.  My father later in life made me privy to a number of incidents and occurrences that brought them close to divorce and I wished he had me told me those things earlier. They might actually have helped me through some rough times in my own marriage.  It was only my mothers religious beliefs concerning divorce and a  fear of community and family ridicule that kept them together.

Marriage can be a wonderful thing but when it doesn’t work it a freaking nightmare.  Yet millions of people still believe that they are the exception to the rule and continue to jump into what at best is a fifty-fifty proposition.  A normal thinking person would almost never gamble their money on those kind of odds but are immediately willing to jump into a legally binding relationship which has a better than average chance of failing.

In the past it was ingrained in children that marriage was the ultimate goal with having kids, a mortgage, and the proverbial white picket fence.  Here are a few more recent facts obtained from the Pew Research Center that begin to show just how much that has changed in recent years.

• The ratio of new marriages to divorces is 2 to 1 (Marriages and Divorces).
  Total Marriages showed a sharp drop in 1998 and after a brief rebound, continued to trend down.
• The population of unmarried women will soon surpass the number of married women. This indicates a rejection of the Divine Institution of Marriage by the general population.
• The number of Unmarried Couple Households (live-in) is increasing steadily.
• Children living with only one parent have increased from 9% in 1960 to 27% in 2009. Of those 87% of the children live with the mother.
• Previous marriage experience plays a big role in whether people want to get married (again) or not.

These facts indicate that the drop in the marriage rate is due primarily to people believing that marriage is more of a problem than a solution.  Apparently people these days are deciding in greater numbers that the marriage gamble isn’t worth the risk.  The emotional damage coupled with the financial ramifications to both partners has taken some of the shine off of the marriage apple.

I’m currently unmarried and that will never change.  I’m sharing my life with my soulmate which was always the most important thing to me. Marriage never supplied me with much of anything except a piece of paper.  Living together has surprisingly given us a great deal of freedom in that we are both free to leave at any time with no divorce nonsense as a consequence. We are together because that’s what we both want.  I actually find myself working harder to keep our relationship peaceful and loving like never before. It was like the marriage document itself put undue pressure on me, both emotionally and financially.

I wish the gay community all the best in their efforts to marry legally.  As I’ve said many times before why should they miss out on all the benefits of marriage.  Arguing, fighting, cheating, financial problems, divorce, alimony, and child support.  They must be crazy.