Your mother was a hampster, and your father smelt of elderberries!!!

Ok here is my theory (get ready, cause it's a doozy) on why half of all marriages fail.

Simple, really: women have changed, but men have essentially not, nor has the institution of marriage itself.

Let me explain. People have been getting married since, what, the beginning of time? Yet back in the day, the "little woman" was the homemaker, and the man went out and earned the money. He came home to dinner already made, the house cleaned, and the kids taken care of.

Nowadays, women are empowered with an education that teaches them that they can be anything they want to be, that they don't have to take "no" for an answer, that they don't have to have children if they don't want them*, and that they deserve respect.

Men, however, are still raised to be mama's boys. They are for the most part not taught how to cook or do laundry, their mom's pick up after them all their lives, they are coddled, and then they get jobs in companies where all the assistants are women.

Bring these two people together and you have a power struggle from day one. Oh sure, the dating part is great, because they don't live together. But as soon as they move in together and/or get married, the problems start. The woman comes home after a long day at work and doesn't want to cook. The man comes home from a long day at work and doesn't want to cook, nor does he know how. So the woman cooks, because the man only knows how to microwave mac n' cheese. He screws up the laundry because he only did it in college when he had to and didn't care what his clothes came out looking like ("what's wrong with putting a couple of red socks into the whites? At least now all the whites match each other...they're pink! I thought you liked pink!!??").

The man expects the house to be clean but the woman is tired. And if they have kids, there's more trouble, because the woman invariably has a job on top of it, but asking the man to take care of them immasculates him.

Anyone see where this is going? Marriage, and all the expectations that go along with it, hasn't changed, but people, specifically women, have...we are trying to fit square pegs into a round hole. Jenny thinks a bigger reason why marriages fail is that they aren't taken as seriously as they used to be. The acceptance of divorce as a viable option has weakened the sanctity of marriage. I don't agree. I think that's a direct byproduct of the fact that the institution of marriage itself fails because people think differently than they did a century ago. Because most marriages fail, people don't feel as badly when theirs does, and therefore they don't take marriage as seriously. A vicious cycle, really.

Marriage will continue to fail at an alarming rate until we adjust our expectations.

Oh one more thing, we need to allow gay people to marry, because most of the ones that want it have been living together quite successfully for a long, long time, and since they're of the same sex, they consider each other equal in the relationship.

Want to see divorce rates decline? LET US GET MARRIED.

~J~

*excludes women in the South.