Fixing The Broken Systems

If anything turns my lip, it's these posts. How do you manage to stay married?

You don't get divorced.

Being married doesn't mean you are happy or even living with your spouse. Marriage does not indicate love, respect or...anything. It is a legal and often religious binding contract

Sorry, folks.

Divorce also doesn't mean someone broke "marriage." Or because you got divorced, you didn't work hard enough or you aren't good enough. I have family members and friends who have been married for a long, long time and see each other a couple times a year for public type functions. Otherwise, they just do their own thing.

Anyhow, for this post - if this couple has been married for 65 years, let's assume they got married in the 1940-1950s, right?

Remember, a woman's career and life-work was considered working on getting married and being married - she was not expect to go to college or work, she was only expected to find a husband. After finding a husband, she was expected to breed.

Not that there is anything wrong with this arrangement - it's just that it was the ONLY arrangement that existed for men and women.

Let's check on a little timeline of why marriages worked so well based on this slice of "when it was broken we fixed it."

• 1908: Oregon limits the workday for women to 10 hours
• 1940: WW2, most men went to combat leaving women alone
• 1941: Wonder Woman is introduced (Just like to mention this)
• 1940: Marital conflicts were usually handled within the home and kept private (Problems? We didn't talk about them so they didn't exist)
• 1950: Domesticity was idealized in the media, and women were encouraged to stay at home. Women who chose to work when they didn't need the paycheck were often considered selfish, putting themselves before the needs of their family
• 1950: Sex was viewed as a key component of a marriage. Without an effective female-controlled contraceptive, young wives faced three decades of childbearing before they reached menopause
• 1974: Equal Credit Opportunity Act passes in the US. Until this, banks required single, widowed or divorced women to bring a man along to cosign any credit application, regardless of their income. That's right, women could not get credit or often have access to money without a man
• 1978: The Pregnancy Discrimination Act is passed in the US. Until the law was put into effect, women could still legally be dismissed from their jobs for becoming pregnant. Can't get birth control? Married? Pregnant? Get thee home!
• 1980: Sexual harassment is first defined by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, although a court had heard the first case in 1977. Up until this point, women could be openly abused outside the home.
• 1993: Marital rape becomes illegal. That's right. 1993, it became illegal for men to rape women

Experts suggested that wives consider whatever they were doing or not doing to cause their husbands to cheat, drink or abuse them. Women could not leave their marriages, they could not support themselves and "experts" easily told them it was their fault.

Husbands and wives of the 1940s began having children at a younger age on average because of lack of birth control. Therefore, most spouses learned to relate to each other in the context of parenting together early on. Couples had more children on average as well, as birth control methods were significantly limited.

Imagine that burden on people today.

So, is this to say all people who have been married for 60+ years are unhappy or all the marriages of those times were unhappy? No.

But, let's not pretend because time has past after a contract has been signed, everything is fantastic and we all need to learn a thing or two because that contract was not broken.

Make you own decisions. Walk away when it's right to walk away. Ain't no shame in admitting a mistake, in leaving a bad situation or even trying again. Don't stay in any type of bad relationship because you think the length of time you suffer is a "good" thing.

Be equal. Be smart. Be kind. Love.