House of Cards

In the United States fifty percent of marriages in the past twenty years end in divorce. Divorce is a traumatizing event for any party involved, even worse if the partners have children. Only twenty-six percent of our generation has gotten married before thirty-two, a large drop from sixty-five percent of the population just three generations ago. In the past century the rate of marriage has been diminishing, in the next century marriage should cease to exist.

The Shakespearean motivation of ‘love’ has only existed as a main reason to get married for the past century. Before that the main reason to get married was the economic benefits it provided. These benefit till existing today, provide multiple profits on different fronts. Nonetheless, the average cost of a wedding in the United States is twenty-five thousand dollars, not including the cost of a honeymoon. The average cost of divorce is fifteen thousand dollars, but it has been known to reach up to a hundred thousand American dollars. It is for these expenses that this makes the economic befits of marriage not worth it when there is a high relationship death rate.

When I was a child, my parents dragged my family through a rather dreadful marriage. It tore relationships apart and destroyed my brother and me mentally. As a result I suffer from anxiety and depression disorders and my brother mentally shut down for three years. When people look at divorce, they often look at the numbers; the rate of divorce or the total cost. What people don’t typically see is the high mental duress, it causes for the people involved. On the average one out of ten Americans suffer from depression, there is an average of 30,000 suicides a year. Depression existing from a failed marriage is a...

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... those more the farther down in time that they will occur, and it's unclear that this is rational. So imagine the situation is this: You are in a game-show. You have the choice of either playing a game which involves opening one of two doors or else leaving the game and opening neither. If you do choose to open a door, then if your choice is lucky you will be married to the person whom you find behind the door, and you love that person, and you will always love that person. If you choose the wrong door, you will also be married and asked to make a permanent commitment to the person behind the door, but that person will be someone you do not have any feelings for. This, removes the hope of having a relationship with someone you do love. The question is, would you choose to play this game?

“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” – Confucius