I know when I got married, I certainly THOUGHT I was in love... but the chemical phase had not passed, either, so...
I was also coming out of a year of trauma and change. My xH had come out of a 5 yr/LTR, and she was being a Fatal Attraction type... his house had burned down... three weeks before I graduated college, my mother was in a car accident and was in a coma for 6 weeks.
My xH and I trauma bonded. And while that isn't a bad thing, in and of itself, I don't think it's the best time to get married. At the time... I think my biggest motivating factor was safety and protection.
My smile and my spontaneity is what probably attracted him to me (at least that's what he said.) But he!!, I was in college. Who isn't happy and spontaneous at that age? (Relative to other, more complex, stages of life). And at the time, I really didn't want anything from him... my plan at that point was to leave and embark on the 'career/life' I had set my sights on.
Typically, life/situational changes are NOT the time to make R decisions, because they introduce a heightened sense of stress that can feel like desire/love. But that's usually when we make them. That is probably why a number of spouses, when faced with the prospect of a spouse leaving, will all the sudden find their desire in full operation mode, once again.
Crisis IS passion. It's the same exact chemical release in the brain. So when things are all tense/dramatic... your attraction is heightened (at least for wayward or possibly departing spouses, since you were attracted to them once before). It's a mini-honeymoon stage, and has nothing, really, to do with children, or relationship dynamics that made the R go south in the first place.
Sometimes the best thing you can do for your kids and their well-being IS leave the R.
These dynamics are explained rather well in The Passion Trap... if anyone hasn't read it yet.
So... I'm not so sure that 'biology' and children are the only things driving a woman's desire to marry a certain 'type' of man.
