<As a frame of reference, average life expectancy in 1900 for an American was 49. It's @ 76 today. That has a bearing on not only what you've observed, but I believe, the divorce rate as well.> Yes, you might be right. And I would like to add that some of the problems with divorce nowadays might also come from a shift in the expectations put upon the marriage, as opposed to the comparatively few changes that took place in our biology, as well as in marriage rules in the last 100 years ... Following your line of reasoning, at the time when people would live about 49 years, marriage was based on shared partnership for life where both partners had the same goal: raising a family. The "shared partnership" was not an imposition or an "ideal", but a necessity: men and women depended on each other to achieve a common goal… and social as well as religious rules (to the extend that they could be separated from each other) were fully compatible with the achievement of these goals…. Without each other, men and women were much weaker, and a divorce usually meant partial or total loss of a huge investiment… We still stress on the shared partnership for life, but now as a goal in itself rather than a mean to achieve a goal … the "shared goal" has become fuzzy … and partnership is no longer a need… men and women do not "need" each to assure their own survival and the children's … for most part, they do not need to be together anymore for real, down-to-earth reasons... I mean, reasons other than psychological considerations that children "do best with mom and dad"… considerations for which there is, also, some empirical counter-evidence as applied to individual cases… The fulfillment of individual needs such as ongoing, long lasting sexual satisfaction with a single partner, the achievement of individual growth and increased intimacy within a long lasting relationship, and having both parents fostering individual careers while raising a family might not be fully achievable goals for most people through the marriage as we know today … Marriage as an institution originally established on different needs and objectives…
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