Is ‘Til Death Do Us Part’ An Old Fashioned Idea?

By Rachel Belle

Listen to Should Marriage Last a Lifetime?

I am not proud of either of the motivations that prompted me to do this story:

1) The opportunity to play a lovably terrible Rick Astley song.

2) A little blurb I read in a trashy celebrity gossip magazine.

The article was about an actress who is getting a divorce after 25 years of marriage. She was asked why it fell apart and her answer really struck me. She said, people live so much longer than we used to, to our 80’s or 90’s even, so should we still expect to make a marriage last until death do us part? Does society need to catch up to science? Should we plan to have several long term marriages in our lives as we change with time? Should divorce continue to hold any taboo?

“The taboo aspect is: people are applauded if they’re married for 60 years or 40 years,” says Kate Stewart, a Seattle psychotherapist and dating coach. “I think what makes this difficult is because a divorce is kind of like a death. In our culture we don’t really have a lot of traditions around grief, as much as in some other cultures. Grief kind of freaks people out so I think there is a lot of negative emotion around that.”

Kate says people change so much over their lifetimes, that it can be rare for a couple to stay compatible throughout the decades.

“Women who got married [in their] early 20’s, who maybe didn’t have a lot of experience dating, there is a very clear point in time between 30 and 33 where they start going, ‘Wait a minute. What happened? What am I doing here?’ and it is so clear to me, that you can almost set time by it.”

She says the early 30’s is a common time for a woman to want to get divorced. The second round of changes comes in midde age.

“As you get older, into like 50’s and 60’s, people just stop caring what other people think. That’s a point where they’re like, ‘You know what, I’ve done all this hard work. I just want to enjoy myself.'”

Diane got married when she was 18 and her husband was 20.

“We were married for 38 years and I decided I wasn’t happy. I didn’t want to live the rest of my life like that, I needed something more, so I got divorced.”

Despite the fact that at least 40% of first marriages will end in divorce, her family and friends were not understanding.

“I had friends that turned on me, family that turned on me,” says Diane. “My own son threatened to not let me see the grandkids anymore. There was a lot of heartache in it, a lot of heartache.”

Susan’s husband died after they spent 30 years together, but she seriously contemplated leaving him at the 15 year mark.

“Our relationship started out when I was 20 and he was 30. It started out like a lot of relationships, with infatuation, but we didn’t really have a lot in common. I think from our generation, you got married to have kids and create a home and we didn’t really have a friendship. I don’t think that’s uncommon, I think you develop different interests.”

She agrees that spending 60 years with one person may not be feasible for most.

“If we are lucky enough to stay married, great! If not, there’s no shame in that.”

Kate agrees:

“It’s kind of unavoidable and I like to encourage people to think ‘Yeah, it’s grreat if you can stay married a long time,’ but to me, I don’t think it’s an expectation.”

She thinks that with the trend of people getting married later in life, or not at all, that society is slowly starting to shift.

“I think people are kind of viewing relationships in a totally different way. Even when I do dating coaching, and working with people who want to be in relationshiop, most of them say, ‘I want to have a long term partner and I want to have kids, but the marriage part of it, I don’t really care about the piece of paper.'”

Now, don’t misunderstand me. I think that if a couple can happily stay together for all of their lives, that’s amazing. But the idea of having many long term relationships over a lifetime should also be accepted and people shouldn’t be judged if they choose to get divorced.