Maggie's Farm

Women with kids want to set a good example to their children. They want their children to feel safe and secure. Many of them will suffer enormously personally if they think it will make those kids' lives even an iota better. Maternal love and commitment seems to have been completely missed in the sad and thought provoking links you cited. Marriage is primarily about the children, not about the happiness and fulfillment of the parents. At least in the marriage vows I took, from the 1662 BCP.

It is not just men who are afraid to marry these days. Even loving, intelligent, attractive, well-adjusted girls with excellent characters are daunted by what they see of our generation's marriages. I do not mean to cast stones at others here. I am simply speaking as someone who has loved and worked with children and young adults for thirty years.

It cannot simply be attributed to narcissism, bad character, selfishness, frivolity etc. What the rising generation sees of most of our marriages doesn't inspires hope or confidence.

By contrast, my own parents fell in love and were engaged within two days, married in five months, survived long separations because of military service, corporate travel (one essential ingredient to marital success?) and stayed married 52 years, with varying degrees of being in love, grimly committed, joyful, resigned, two oxen yoked to the plow together, always put their marriage ahead of everything else: work, financial security, kids' welfare, extended family ties, etc.

They were not ever religioius believers except externally conforming sporadic churchgoers--the marriage vows were the central commitment of each of their lives.

We children alternated beetween being inspired by this, reacting against it, and vowing never to do to our own children what they did to us (will spare you all) at times. We were surrounded by other families started by couples in lifelong marriages, who also survived unemployment, vocational earthquakes, illness, financial reverses, but whom we thought (typical obnoxious adolescents) were cooller or nicer than our own parents and who certainly treated their kids better. All of us children wanted to and did get married and have kids.

But not a single one of our own children wants to get married (a couple of them do want to have to have kids). This despite the fact that all the rising generation of cousins are devout Christians, tenderly reared by parents who put them first, tho continuing with WASP family traditions of demanding a lot academically, not spoiling, etc.

I think the difference is that every single marriage (this holds for all my cousins, too, not simply my siblings and I) has been miserably unhappy. Most of the marriages have lasted. The chief difference from our parents' marriages has been the chronic job insecurity of the males. All as well educated and smart as their dads, most equally diligent, but all having had to work harder, for bosses and companies who have treated them worse, and suffered a variety of physical stress related ailments that their dads never did. The women have all rolled up their sleeves, gone out to work in menial jobs that left them free to meet their domestic responsibilities after school, to support the families when the men could not, and the men's careers have languished. You will perhaps sneer at our being wacko or chronically depressed or failures for this, but we womenfolk have tended to seek out friends who encourage us to stay loyal despite minor details like feelings, with exhortations like a friend from church's who embraced me the other day and said "It is more important to have an enduring marriage than a happy one!

I believe that the children feel more loved and more secure than any of us ever did, but it saddens me that none of them seem to have any hope of finding lasting love. They see marriage as an endurance contest with few rewards.

I used to work with inner city teenaged mothers in my youth who viewed men as useless and unreliable, good only for sex, and I know many carefully reared white suburban girls these days who have a similar view. Very sad.

For years, I have searched in vain for even one happily married couple I could expose my children to so that they might be more hopeful about their own futures.

A great puzzle. If I blame anyone, it is myself. And so I have struggle to at least fake it in my marriage, so as not to discourage them(not successful--kids can figure it out early). I go around like Woody Allen in "Annie Hall" asking people who appear content "What's your secret?" but still chuckle over the movie 's reply "Well, actually, I;m just shallow and superficial...and so am I?" or whatever the exact words were.

Those of us who are struggling would listen to helpful advice or encouragement. But what we mostly get is either lying bragging "well, I still keep myself looking as hot as one of Theo's babes, and you wouldn't believe what he did to me on the kitchen island the other morning.... I have been able to practice the profession I trained for, my husband is a gazillionaire, and all the kids are at Ivies....do you want a referral to my colorist?`' It would be so much more useful if people would simply share their own successes in marriage, what has worked, what has kept them going, what they love about their spouse, how life is better with them. Small victories in real life encourage and motivate more than lying PR.

There's a good song by Sting from Mercury Falling about the plight of the poor dad in a modern divorce..."I'm so Happy..." Very poignant, but then he could sing words out of the telephone book and make them sound good...About to watch him play Feyd-Ratha in "Dune" for at least the sixth time with the kid...

Trying to persuade other kid, just of voting age that it will make a difference to vote. But depressing having to agree with her that all the candidates are disappointing, and it will be a matter of voting against the Wicked Witch and her ghastly flying monkeys....

With all the awesome Americans in this country, you'd think we could have a better race. It's as if one lived in a community where everyone kept wonderful hunting dogs that worked hard, were a credit to their species, but the only dogs that appeared at the dog show were snarling pound pit bulls....not to be trusted, vicious, reactive, ugly.