Family

What happened to marriage in this country? 50% of marriages end in divorce and 40% of first marriages do too. There are certainly cases of bad situations where someone needs to leave, some sort of abuse but, it's just too common to get divorced. Sure it's easy for me to pontificate being 24 and single, never married but I've been close. Twice girls said they wanted to marry me but both times I didn't pull the trigger, just wasn't sure enough to make that lifelong commitment. Yeah, that's right - lifelong. People don't seem to get that anymore.

I take issue with the perceived transitivity of marriage. If marriage is just another phase of a relationship in a mobius loop of date-live together-engage-marry-divorce-date-live together-engage-marry what's the point of marriage at all? Don't get me wrong, I'm not down on marriage, quite the opposite. That's one of the most important things I hope to accomplish in life. I just don't understand how we got to the point of individuality to the exclusion of partnership.