@JonF: Is the marriage failure rate because of this?
What is the "marriage failure rate"? The basic problem I have -- empirically speaking -- with the so-called "divorce rate" and "divorce problem" (eegads! the sky is falling! marriage is a disposable institution! people are getting divorced more than ever!) is that it is a bullsh*t statistic.
It's like the cancer rate. Cancer is on the rise! Is it? Or is cancer detection on the rise?
It used to be very, very difficult to get a divorce and, even when possible, socially problematic in the extreme (viz., His Highness (wikipedia link) King Edward VIII and Mrs. Simpson).
So we don't really know what the divorce rate "really" would have been in times-gone-by if it were the case that one could divorce, legally and comparatively easily. It strikes me as being probable that people divorced at more-or-less the same rate, only they divorced "in situ" -- Archie and Edith, sitting there in separate chairs, more-or-less silent. No "marriage" as an engagement of two souls, but a by-then mandatory contractual arrangement.
So I disregard all notions that people divorce more now than ever. Frankly, if the choice were a loveless "marriage" ending in a dispirited death or a divorce, I'd choose the latter.
@Lotus: It is amazing to me that everyone seems to leave the advent of children and their personalities and needs out of the equation.
I don't think that's a fair observation. No one to my knowledge on any thread has left out the advent of children. We're merely trying to break the discussion down into more manageable bits. On that point, however, I think you're on the right track. There is the "first" family -- he and she. Then there is the "second" family -- he and she and Wee One. And then there is the "second + n" families in which the siblings grow up.
So there may well not, in fact, be A marriage for the same couple, but multiple, overlapping marriages.
Which just makes everything ever-so-much-more interesting -- which of those marriages is one trying to save?
