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From: arnold@ucsfcgl.UUCP (Ken Arnold%CGL)
Newsgroups: net.women
Subject: Re: Name Changes ("traditions that have evolved" disappearing)
Message-ID: <660@ucsfcgl.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 1-Oct-85 21:32:02 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucsfcgl.660
Posted: Tue Oct  1 21:32:02 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 3-Oct-85 06:08:32 EDT
References: <5211@elsie.UUCP> <11302@rochester.UUCP>
Reply-To: arnold@ucsfcgl.UUCP (Ken Arnold)
Organization: UCSF Computer Graphics Lab
Lines: 54

>> = Me
> = Ray Frank

>> Well, let's be a little more real, here.  The average length of a
>> marriage around 100 years ago was approximately the same as it is now.
>> For a person to be married two or three times was considered normal.
>> However, ends of marriages were usually by death, not divorce.  The
>> institution of marriage evolved in a situation where "till death do us
>> part" was not so long a thing.  Whether people can, in general,
>> maintain a marriage over 50 to 75 years has yet to be seen, but the
>> institution must and will, at least, change to adapt to longer lives.
>> So perhaps the "unhealthy" divorce rate is quite normal and healthy for
>> the population.
>
>The divorce rate of people married 7 years or less is statistically
>much high now than at any time in the past.  What are you talking
>about when you mention 50 or 75 year marriages?  Staying married for
>20, 30, 40 years, etc probably is a feat of great accomplishment, but
>is staying married for greater than 7 years considered a great
>accomplishment?  The divorce rate is higher now than in the past.  No
>qualification of this fact is necessary.  The divorce rate is not
>higher as you imply because people are living longer, this is absurd.

Is a 7 year marriage a great accomplishment?  I don't know.  I suppose
it depends on the people.  But what the point you seems to have
overlooked or misread in my letter is that people, particularly women,
died young in older days.  For them, a 7 year marriage generally meant
that a women had survived, say, 3 to 7 pregnancies.  This was not
extremely rare, but neither was it unusual to die in childbirth.  Add
in all the other then-common causes of death, and you'll find that, for
both of a couple to live for seven years after a marriage was only
somewhat better than 50/50 proposition.

So what has happened, in general, is that the divorce rate has
increased, and the death rate has declined, and the affect on longevity
of any single marriage has about evened out.  What this could indicate
is that it is not reasonable to expect the average marriage to last any
longer than it does today.  It's just that now one can get out of a
marriage without waiting for some natural event to kill off your
spouse.

Again, the institution of marriage that you wish to hold to evolved
when mortality made most marriages short.  When normal mortality makes
a marriage at 25 likely to last 50 years, not less than 10, one cannot
expect the institution to stand still.  It must adapt to this changing
situation.

Another thing to learn is that the problem of sundering marriages and
step-parents is essentially as bad today as it used to be in the good
old days when divorce was nearly unheard of.  It's just that now
children have to deal with the trauma of parental divorce, and before
they had to deal with parental death.

		Ken Arnold