Recently I found out that a couple who were friends of my parents are divorcing. My parents divorced when I was 15 years old. They'd been married since 1964 (I think), but divorced after 23 years of marriage. I kinda understood why my mom divorced my dad. He was kind of stuck in his life and couldn't move forward to fix the problems. My mom on the other hand, saw the problems and knew if she didn't try to fix them the family would suffer. How? Well, my older sister was going to Baylor, and my younger sister and I were working on high school and would soon be going to college. The problem was, Baylor was expensive but it would help ensure a good future for my sister. My mom couldn't get enough financial aid to help pay some of the debt because she and my dad were married. It didn't matter that he didn't have a stable job and they barely made enough to pay the bills and the mortgage. She tried to get my dad to see how stuck he was and to get him to work with her to solve the problem, but he was stuck. She'd grown as a person, and he wasn't growing, so they grew apart. They have since remarried to really great people, so it's worked out I guess. So, I get why my parents divorced.
But here's my question: Your kids are grown (they might even have kids of their own), you've invested more time being married than you did being single, you're in your middle age time in your life, and you've been married almost 40 years. Why divorce? If you're lucky you still look sorta good, you've got "the change" under control (maybe), and you've invested maybe 3/4 of your life to the other person. Dating was hard enough when you were in your twenty's, imagine how hard it will be now? So why divorce? Okay, I mean if it's something really horrible like one of you has an affair and wants to run off with your (insert whatever you'd like here: secretary, cabana boy, whatever) Okay, divorce. But if it's because you're bored or something, really? Divorce is really traumatic - for the kids (and grandkids if there are any). Couldn't you come up with an agreement or something? Isn't that what a lot of people did before the great 70's when the divorce rate started climbing. Don't you think they had agreements about how things would be because getting a divorce wasn't the best idea?
I suppose that from my perspective it's hard to understand. I mean I've got a really GREAT guy, and we've already been through enough that if I was going to divorce him I guess I would have by now. But Jason's going to have to do something REALLY stupid in order for me to divorce him. I know what I have is special, don't get me wrong. But I also know that I hated dating in my twenties, so I can't imagine how I'd feel in my sixties. And it's hard to tell when you first get married what someone will be like 40 years from now, but it's really hard for me to understand why you'd give up on something you've spent most of your life doing. I also think of my grandparents. My Granny could've walked out on my Grandpa plenty of times and no one would've blamed her, they probably would've helped her move. But she loved him enough to stay, and he was man enough to know what a good thing he had and he worked hard to deserve her (I think). She stayed with him until the day he died - almost 62 years of marriage. And until the day she died, she'd often say she could hear him calling for her so he was still with her even though he'd moved on to Heaven.
Who knows, maybe it's just late and I'm tired so that's why I don't get it, but it seems hard to understand why you'd bail on someone after spending 3/4 of your life with them (unless of course it's something really unforgivable). What do y'all think?
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