Q: Why do some marriages, 20 or 30 years in the making, split up?
A: We know that the overall rates for divorce are going down compared to what they were in the 1990s. But we also know that fewer people are choosing to get married. At the moment, less than half of our young people will get married. They are choosing, instead, to live together. Family life is changing.
For those who get married, the most likely time for divorce is when people are younger.
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In the United States, for example, the highest rate for divorce are for young men between the ages of 20 and 24. The highest rate for women is those 19 and younger.
In Canada, the highest rates for divorce are for marriages that have only been around for two or three years. We know that the longer people stay married, the less likely it is that they will get a divorce.
But something else happens. When people are around 40 or 50, a number of them also choose to get divorced. One would think that after being married for that long they would be in a stable marriage, but not always.
Some claim that the stress of finances is too much for them and they want to leave marriages that are struggling to pay off monthly bills.
Others say that long-standing alcohol and drug abuse ruin their marriages. Some say that control is an issue, and that their marital partners are more interested in controlling them than they are in loving them. Others say that they never did love their partners and that it just took them a while to realize that marriages without love are not worth continuing.
While all of these may be true, I suspect that the bottom line for long-term marriages that fail is that the people did not spend enough time nurturing their intimate relationships.
The daily responsibilities of living are demanding on all marriages. When we are younger we are busy building our homes, having children and raising them, trying to make a living and getting involved in the community. Finding time to nurture marital relations sometimes takes concerted effort, with all of the other responsibilities we have.
Some people do not do it, and 20 or 30 years into the marriage, when they have time to spend together, they find out that they are strangers.
Those who are in successful marriages nurture them. This requires more than an occasional supper in an elegant restaurant. It is a daily responsibility. It is those few moments, every day, when people check in with each other, find out how they are feeling, dreaming and thinking. They get to know each other and no matter how long two people are married, they can always learn something new about each other. It can be exciting.
I think it is sad when two people who have been married for so long, find themselves looking toward a divorce. Twenty or 30 years of their lives have been wasted.
For many, all that they needed to do was invest more in their intimate relationships. The beauty of this is that the commitment to the marriage can start anytime, even after years of neglect. It can start now, today. So why don’t we do it?
Jacklin Andrews is a family counsellor from Saskatchewan who has taught social work at two universities. Mail correspondence in care of Western Producer, Box 2500, Saskatoon, Sask., S7K 2C4 or e-mail jandrews@producer.com.
