Divorce Insight Into the Quandaries of Marriage and Divorce

The American conundrum surrounding the institution of marriage (high marriage rates combined with nearly equally high divorce rates) can be summed up in one pithy proclamation: people get married for the wrong reasons. Love, once considered a prerequisite for a proposed lifelong commitment to another, is so much of a forgone conclusion in modern times that it rarely factors into the equation for today's marriage. A considerable number of other factors (including but not limited to extramarital pregnancy, societal expectation and a lack of viable alternatives) account for the vast majority of contemporary marriages in America; the subsequent high divorce rate and myriad ruptured homes attest to the transience of these reasons and their unions.

To better prepare Americans for the possibility of marriage by the time adulthood is reached would require grave reconsideration of the common reasons for marriage today. A willing bond with another for the endurance of life's duration is exceedingly rare; adequate marriage preparation must teach youths and adolescents to acknowledge this fact. By changing the regard for marriage from one of inevitability to that of a rare, fairly phenomenal occurrence (after all we see how little monogamy exists in nature outside of mankind), people would take the important initial step of respecting...

Further preparation would require separating the manifestations of these ideals into their realistic applications (which may be far from ideal for the vast majority of a marriage's duration) to give Americans a more profound understanding this institution's contractual obligations.
A large degree of the heightened rate of divorce in America can be attributed to the plethora of opportunities that exist for men and women in contemporary society that did not exist before. In previous epochs of American history, people routinely married directly out of high school or not too long afterwards. The increased rate of students attending college, the influx of travel options which increases the ease in which distant locations can be accessed, as well as a lower tolerance (and need for that tolerance) for unhappiness in the form of physical and mental abuse all provide deviations from the previous normal pattern of remaining with one's high school lover as long as possible. Couple these reasons with the fact that a host of career and monetary options exist in which women can provide for themselves without the financial support of a husband, and the staggering rates of divorce become that much more understandable.

In many ways, denizens in contemporary American society have access to a fair amount of…