Dear Miriam, 
Don’t you think that any institution with a 51% failure rate on the first attempt and a 64%(!) failure rate on the second try needs a radical change? These are the statistics of divorce rates! Is marriage going out of style? If not marriage, then what?
Gail, 28

Dear Gail,

I am not sure that I (or anybody else) can solve this problem: marry, don’t marry, remarry. I am not even sure if marriage is going out of style or obsolete. But, I am sure that our quest for happiness has changed substantially. It is about experiencing fulfillment and meaning in our lives NOW, not when we’ll find the right partner. Actually, for the very first time in our cultural history, simplicity is not considered to be a preferred life-style, and it is not difficult to see why: for too many of us, the dream of being happily married has turned into nightmares of our relationships deteriorating.

For every happily married client I can think of, I can name at least ten who complain about their husbands – or worse yet, bear the scars (physical and/or emotional) of a bad marriage and don’t open their mouths at all. In my counseling office, I see women who have become fearful of driving, afraid to be home alone, don’t know how to balance a checkbook (or even write a check!), women who seemed perfectly sensible before marriage, and who were branded as “incapable” by their husbands, and then by themselves. Many of us “nice ladies”, for whom singledom was the only way to marriage, have never been “conscious singles”. We lived for “happily ever after”… or did we live at all?

We all have heard from that divorced friend: “I was dying to marry and have children.” Is it only a figure of speech? Or maybe it is a testimony of an “unlived life”? We all have what we are capable of having right now, given who we are. Paradoxically, what we are is the reason we do not have what we want. Stubbornly, we want what we want without having to change who we are… but that is impossible! What we need is ourselves, our lost wholeness. We need to regain our missing self. And this is always a journey, and it is much easier to start when we are single. And because we are not being our ‘Whole Self’, whether we marry or not, we’re not living “happily every after”.

I invite you to think about your life. Are your days (and nights) spent doing things that are meaningful and make you smile? Are you happy? If not, what would you like to change?

Love,
Miriam

The statistics in this article reflect the separation rate at the time of original publication.