Marriages don’t last anymore because..

We are also living much longer AND ageing less.

You know perfectly well I’m not referring to situations such as yours. I was perfectly specific. Women who take no responsibility for their actions in choosing a series of unsuitable partners and having children with them should be held accountable for their lack of judgment and not enabled to continue making ‘mistakes’ which are anything but. It’s not misogynistic to expect something so basic from women. In fact, it’s misogynistic to constantly excuse and downplay their actions and the consequences of these low-value, transient relationships on the children that result.

Oh god isn’t that the truth.

I’m always astonished by tales of men who ran off with their wife’s best friend.

I know it happens but… ick

Did people put more effort into staying together, or was it more a case of one person (usually the woman) having to put up and shut up because of the fall out of leaving?

I wouldn't fancy a single one of my friends' husbands my age.

So having children, did in fact impact your career and income.

If you had stayed child free you would have followed the same path but your business would have grown more quickly.

You spent your entire career planning for the inevitable financial impact of motherhood on your career.

The point is that men rarely have to make that choice. The only man I know who has ever had to make that choice is a widower whose wife died when their children were very young.

Men are selfish lazy and puerile and only care about sex.

Not at all. As I said, I wasn't really bothered whether I had children or not. I wouldn't have stayed in the financial director position either way, in fact I give it up before having children. I'd not have gone back to it had we been unable to conceive nor do anything else different, other than probably grow the business more/quicker.

Children are quite sweet though. They might drive a complete wrecking-ball through many women's careers and finances but, if you like them, they do make up for a lot.

I've often wondered what happens to all the sweet, mischievous little 8 year old boys, who are so helpful, independent, funny, such good company and who can do anything and have amazing "super-powers", between that age and adulthood, to result in so many unpleasant men who don't pull their weight or worse. Something clearly goes very wrong along the way in a lot of cases.

I’ve been with my husband for 36 years and married for 32. When people say that’s a long time, what’s the secret, I joke and say ‘low expectations’ but really what I mean is ‘realistic expectations’ The day I got married was exactly 7 years from the day we met and 4 years after we started living together. We both knew this was what we wanted to do and went into it eyes open.
i wasn’t expecting perfection, i knew my husband’s faults and he knew mine and we knew we accepted and could work with them.
ive never had a day where I’ve seriously considered leaving him, if he died I wouldn’t marry again as I would never find that depth of shared experience with anyone else, the jokes only we know and understand. The ability to have our own lives within our join life.
Today I feel everything is so disposable, and rushed. People believe in some fantasy idea of marriage and just throw it away when reality doesn’t match.
And before anyone, jumps on me, I do know that some people make bad marriages and anyone in such a marriage should just walk away if they can.
But marriage in a strange way, no longer really fits in today’s society, people don’t connect in the same way. I would rather pick up the phone and speak to someone, today that’s seem as an oddity and if you can’t speak to people but would rather use electronic communications to keep people at a distance, how can a marriage ever work.
I’ve seen post in MN where I just think why don’t you just speak to the person you are raging about, trying to discern their meaning from a written word.

you got so close op - two people who spend their lives looking at each other. Two people. You can’t work on a marriage on your own and it’s a sensible person (usually woman) who knows this.

Let me guess, your colleague was a man??

Yes this ^ half of my friends are with men that quite frankly, they clearly are unhappy with. They then have kids, get married and are… still unhappy.

I expect more from both men and women. While I agree it’s a father’s responsibility to take care of his children, I expect women to make better choices in the father of those children - that’s their responsibility.

The problem with this is that, if women were actually able to predict which men would turn into creeps before they became pregnant or had a baby, the birth rate would be even lower than it presently is. Most women would end up not having children. There just aren't that many decent men out there, in terms of those who will actually share the burden of family life fairly. They're very much in the minority, although many will talk the talk.

My grandmother and grandfather hated each other. They didn't believe in divorce (devout catholics) and they made it very clear to us all how much disdain they had for each other. My grandfather would say things like, "Is your grandmother here? I didn't notice a broom at the door" implying she was a witch. At his retirement do, when he blew out the candles on his cake, my grandmother was asked if she'd made a wish too. Her response in public, "the widow's pension".
Though my grandfather was the breadwinner, my grandmother didn't take anything lying down and took him to court over finances and charged him for making his meals and washing his clothes. They were a funny old pair and kind of thrived off their hate for each other.
There was no abuse just a clashing of personalities that wasn't recognised in their 4-month courtship in their early 20's. There would have been shame regarding divorce but I don't think that's the reason they didn't do it. When grandma died, granda was very lonely and I think it would have been the same the other way round.

…because people are living longer. A woman who takes care of her body can now expect to live to her late 80s in relatively good health. If she retires at 67, that means she’s got another 20 years of active life. My mother goes to Italian lessons and a book group and she’s 83. She has a friend who is 81 and is planning to drive down to Portugal next year. People (especially women) get to 50 or so and think “now that the kids have left, do I really want to spend the next 30 years with this miserable, moaning bloke who never wants to go anywhere or do anything except drink and watch TV.”

What is going to happen when the first generation of ant-ageing drugs hit the market in the 2030s and people start living to 120 in good health?

Add into the mix the fact that women will no longer put up with the shit their mother’s and grandmothers put up with and I can’t see lifetime marriages surviving. Marriage will have to evolve into something new.

If a man was violent, or raping you (which as his wife was legal until the 1970s) was enduring this because you had no other option “working on it”?

Try 1992...

I think in the past plenty of people didn't bother to work it out and just stayed miserable and married. Obviously some couldn't because they were fundamentally incompatible too. But there were plenty of unhappy marriages - see plenty of Jane Austen's older characters. Mr Bennet wouldn't have dreamed of divorcing Mrs Bennet, but he just retreated into his study instead. She does zero self reflection and develops a martyr complex. Together they fail to financially plan for the future of their daughters.

Look at Charlotte Lucas/Collins. She encurages her pompous, dull husband to spend lots of time doing other things. She occupies herself with 'parish and poultry'. I doubt they ever sat down and had a conversation about how he wasn't meeting her emotional needs. And she goes into that marriage with her eyes open to it.

What does she mean by “work on it” @PictureImperfect?

If a man cheated on you repeatedly, is ignoring it because you had no money and no way to leave “working on it”?

If a man was violent, or raping you (which as his wife was legal until the 1970s) was enduring this because you had no other option “working on it”?

Was staying in a miserable marriage because you’d been forced to give up your job and become a housewife so had no income of your own “working on it”?

Not being able to get a mortgage on your own might mean you have no option but to stay and “work on it”.

And this is aside from the multitude of women who have lazy, misgynistic husbands who won’t do their 50% share of child rearing and housework. Many women were forced to “work on it” with these men (i.e. simply suck it up and accept being treated like a house servant and second-class citizen) even if the men were not physically abusive or vile to them in other ways.

Fortunately women now have choices and can maintain their financial freedom. Salaries and career progression are still hugely affected by inequality but actually the only way that will change is when sufficient numbers of women stop tolerating the misogynism and inequality and it seems an increasing proportion of young women are doing exactly that and refusing to marry/ stay with a husband who doesn’t treat them with respect as an equal and pull their own weight.

This is why most divorces are instigated by women, why the marriage rate is falling, is a contributory factor to the falling birth rate, and is also why there is a counter-movement and backlash of misogynism and incels who are infuriated that an increasing proportion of women won’t tolerate this nonsense. What they don’t realise is that this has made younger women even less prepared to entertain a relationship with a sub-standard man.

Many women have also discovered that being single is actually quite pleasant. It’s interesting how many happily married women say that if they divorced/ were widowed they’d never marry again. There were always social stereotypes (spinster, left on the shelf, crazy cat lady etc) to try to convince women that they needed a partner. This had to be done through social conditioning because we now know marriage increases men’s wellbeing, earnings and life expectancy on average and decreases all of these things for women.

The majority of women would still prefer to find a lifelong partner and build a life together but - quite rightly - demand that the partner has respect for them and does an equal share of the work involved. The primary reason the relationship failure rate is so high is that a significant proportion of men still haven’t accepted that if they want a partner and family they’ll have to do this. If not, they can thrash around in rage at the unfairness of it all but it certainly won’t make women any more inclined to marry them, procreate with them, or stay married to them if they revert to such behaviour.

The solution isn’t that women should reverse all of this progress and go back to tolerating awful relationships. The solution is that men need to behave like competent, decent adults and raise their game to be equal partners and then they may be less likely to find themselves being served with divorce papers, or with being unable to find anybody prepared to marry them at all.

I think it's a combination of the two.

I think people now often dont fully understand what an absolute commitment marriage is.

I'm not at all surrounded by awful people.
These are all examples of things I see posted here, countless times. There in black and white for all to see.

People are less marrigable than they used to be. On the whole we're more individualistic than we used to be. Less willing to work together for the family's best interest. More interested in their own fun/joy/excitement. Less willing to go through difficult times. Less willing to pool resources. Less willing to share yourself fully, co-dependence is seen as bad.

I think it may be because there was a time when women just had to put up with ill treatment from men they thought they loved but who turned out to be nasty pieces of work.

In past generations, the woman had to
give up work to look after the children and would not find new employment if they were married, so they were basically trapped and left financially dependent on someone who
might be a bully, abuser or a philanderer.

Additionally, there was the societal shame associated with it which meant that many women just put up with miserable existences.