Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lO2FUpVEApE
Jay Leno once joked that, if conservatives want to punish people for being gay, the best way to do it, surely, is by letting them get married, since after all, same-sex marriage is bound to become the number one cause of same-sex divorce, and then they'll be sorry.
I once had a co-worker who joked that, the next time he thought about getting married, he would save time by just finding some woman who hated his guts and buying her a house.
I once heard the joke that, after a few years of marriage, the only type of sex the couple is having is hallway sex, which basically just entails the husband and wife walking past one another in the hallway and saying, "Fuck you!" And of course, after that, comes courtroom sex, where the wife and her attorney screw the husband for all he's worth.
I, myself, have observed the very curious similarity between the Spanish word "casado," which means "married" and the word "cansado," which means "tired." I once asked a Mexican lady about that and she said they were the same thing. She was joking, but I wonder.
Once, thumbing through a dictionary, I came across the word "fiancé," with one "e" (masculine), then "fiancée," with two "e"'s (feminine), and then the word "fiasco," in that order. I wonder.
In my more credulous days, I caught an episode of Dr. Phil in which he rattled off a few marriage statistics. I don't know how accurate these are, so I recommend taking them with a grain of salt, but he said that 50% of first marriages end in divorce, 60% of second marriages, and 70% of third.
Even at this more credulous point in my life, it occurred to me just how misleading this use of these figures might be, even assuming they are accurate. It looks as if it's saying, "If you can't make it work the first time, it's only going to get more difficult. You will be cursed."
But consider this for a moment. Let us assume a random sampling of 1000 people destined for marriage. Let's also assume monogamous marriage to people outside the sample. If 50% of first marriages end in divorce, and all 1000 of these people get married, that means that about 500 are eventually bound to get divorced.
Now let's assume that all the people in this sample are determined to keep trying until they get it to work. This means that all 500 are going to get married again. If 60% of second marriages end in divorce, that makes it sound like 60% of the original 1000, which is 600, when in fact, it's 60% of the 500 who got divorced from their first marriages, which is only 300.
So what if those 300 then go on to get married again? Well, 70% of 300 is 210. If 70% of third marriages end in divorce, that's only 210 of the original 1000 people. That's barely a fifth who have not managed to make it work by the third attempt.
So if 50% of first marriages, 60% of second marriages, and 70% of third marriages end in divorce, that means that 50% of the people have made it work on the first attempt, 70% by the second, and almost 80% by the third, if we assume that 100% of those who make the first attempt are determined to keep trying until they succeed. Of course, in real life, it's bound to be a little less than that.
But even so, so what? Dr. Phil, like much of the programming in the US is predicated upon the completely unwarranted assumption that divorce is necessarily some sort of failure. Such is about as absurd as a notion can get.
First of all, most marriages that end don't end in this huge, stereotypical, Hollywood style, hyper-drama. That's a stigma. Most marriages that end end with both people genuinely regretful that it just didn't work out. That does not necessarily mean that there's someone to blame for it, and there's no particular reason why two people have to become the most vitriolic of enemies after getting a divorce. Sometimes, two people just grow apart. Sometimes, two people just realize they are not in love anymore. Sometimes two people just realize that they got along better before they tied the knot. Sometimes, with the ever-increasing life expectancy, "until death do us part" is too long to wait. How much sense does it make to insist on making two people prisoners of one another, resentful of one another, perhaps even enemies of one another, when they would be able to get along if they were to split?
The fact is that people are human beings, and as such, we sometimes make mistakes. I have encountered the obsevation that this is the reason there are rubber mats around spitoons. People make mistakes, and sometimes, one of those mistakes is getting married. Maybe the mistake was the person one chose to marry. Maybe it was the act of taking oneself for the marrying type. Maybe it was just one's assessment of the circumstances at the time. Maybe the mistake was assuming that just because you and another person have a tendency to get along, that you should marry each other. But given the fact that people can make mistakes, what could be more absurd than to regard the admission of it as some sort of failure?
That is what you are doing, after all, when you get a divorce; admitting that you made a mistake; that you are human. If getting married was, indeed, a mistake, it was a mistake whether you admit it or not, so by refusing to admit it, you're only causing yourself, your spouse, and any children you may have undue distress.
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