> > Exactly five years ago today, I manned the guestbook and "floofed" the bride's train in a beautiful wedding. It was raining, but we got some cute pictures of the groom holding an umbrella over his new wife as they ran to the car.
> >
> > They had everything going for them. They both came from happy two-parent families, had been dating for about two years, and seemed perfect for each other. They didn't have a lot of money, but they were able to put a small down payment on a house. Within four years they had two adorable little girls. They loved God, each other, and their kids.
> >
> > And now they are getting divorced. The part that's even more sad is that this is the second one of my friends to get divorced in less than two months. What went wrong? The statistics say that something like half of all marriages end in divorce.
> >
> > I watched my mom go through a messy divorce, and vowed that I would NOT go through the same thing. So what is my point? My hope is that the divorce rate will begin to turn around because the kids of the divorced parents are growing up and realizing how terrible divorce is. Maybe enough of us not-yet-married ones have seen the results of divorce and have decided to do things differently.
> >
> > Ell"Will NOT be another statistic!"myruh
>
> A Christian friend of mine and I have often had this conversation before. My parents divorced when I was thirteen, and his parents seemed on the brink of separation for a few years. Both of us decided a long time ago (before marriage) that we would never, ever become divorced from our future spouses, not just because of our conviction about the wrongness of divorce according to the Bible, but out of sheer anger at the very statistic you've cited. I hope, with you, that other Gen-X'ers are able to use disgust with previous failed marriages that we've seen as an extra incentive to avoid that error ourselves.
>
> Iss "going on three years wedded now; my unfortunate friend still can't get a date" achar

It's refreshing to hear both of you saying that.
People no longer think of divorce as the terrible thing that it is. 13 is the worst possible time to have to go through that. I worked with kids that age for many years and I've seen them fall apart.
First they are depressed and don't want to talk about it. Sometimes, nobody knows what bothering them. Then their attitude towards school changes, and more often than not their grades drop. They usually are furious with their parents for a while, then they try to make up for the hurt by playing one parent against the other to get what they want. (Mama/Daddy lets me do it.) or (If you won't buy me one, I know Mama/Daddy will.) It works like a charm if the parents don't communicate. Most don't. Who would want to put a kid through that?
I can understand some divorces because of drinking, abuse, etc. but most of them are the result of selfishness and the lack of flexability that goes with it.
Marriages can work. My wife and I have been married 45 years this December and even though we are very different people, it has worked. Some things balanced out. For example, I have more formal education, but she is smarter. We learned long ago to overlook and adjust. Some people apparantly can't do that.
My grandparents(all four of them) had a total of 14 kids. Only one got a divorce. I have two sisters and the three of us were never divorced.
It sounds like it doesn't run in the family, but I certainly hope divorce isn't genetic.
Howard