Then and Now

A typical statistic that you always hear recited is fifty percent of all marriages end in divorce. I remember growing up in the 70’s and 80’s a lot of my friends’ parents were divorced. On my neighborhood block in elementary school, all of my friends had divorced parents. Even looking at my own family history, about fifty percent of my aunts and uncles are divorced and even my in-laws our divorced. How did we get to such a state?

I used to not understand how so many people could end up divorced. Karen and I often talked about this subject and about how we could keep our marriage strong. Life was easy. We were college educated, had great jobs, were making good money, and living in a one bedroom condo. We had lots of disposable income. After going to college full time and working part time for five years straight with no money, life seemed very good and it was.

What was a typical day like? Go to the office. Work out at the gym on lunch break. Work the afternoon. Come home and take a nap! Dress and go to dinner, a movie or even a night club. I’m not talking Friday or Saturday night. This could be any night of the week. Weekends were a whole other story. Road trips to Vegas, Mexico or Santa Barbara. Scuba diving and spear fishing. You name it, we did it.

After a couple of years of this, you end up on a Saturday morning and hear this, “Honey, I don’t feel so well. I’m nauseous.” No problem, we’ll just relax around the condo and rent a couple of movies today. After she throws up twice and tells you the tuna fish sandwich you made for lunch smells like dog crap, you’re driving to the drugstore for a pregnancy test. Life has changed forever.

Things are a little different these days. You’re lucky to get to the gym three times a week. Work sucks. I never get to nap. Going out to dinner is Souplantation. Going to the movies is too expensive and the only place I go on a weeknight is in a carpool and it’s someplace I really don’t want to go to anyways. I have to plan a weekend get away three months in advance and check the school, football, dance and soccer schedules before I book a room somewhere. The only scuba diving I do is at the bottom of the swimming pool with a stainless steel brush scrubbing algae off the plaster. My only excitement is watching Saturday Night Live on Sunday morning. You heard me right. Nothing like a few laughs at 6:30 am Sunday with a cup of coffee before we head to church.

For a lot of us, these changes take place incrementally over a twenty year period. Some of us handle it well and some of us don’t. For Karen and I, it’s about making each other laugh. We find that being able to laugh at ourselves keeps us from not getting too pampered or too entitled or too lazy or too cynical. For some reason I can’t help but think our generation has done a lot better job staying married than a lot of the baby boomers. I hardly know anyone who is divorced.

Really, you’re still that same person you were twenty years ago. I’m still that same guy living in that one bedroom condo, I’m just older and have a lot more stuff.

Share