Marriage, Divorce, and the Economy

The other day, NPR ran a story about marriage divorce and the economy which you can read here. The story has a couple main hitches. First is that a tough economy is tough, emotionally speaking, on marriages. Second is that divorce in and of itself is a rather expensive endeavour ("a few hundred dollars" if everything goes without a hitch). So the expected result is that more people are living in less than happy marriages with the given economic times. They even take this a step further and suggest that a net result of this is an increase in domestic violence despite admitting that said violence is "on the decline" and there is "no conclusive evidence."

A Lansing area pastor spoke a bit about marriage which can be heard here. It is here that I am going to pull most of my opinions from not because I innately agree, but because Noel is one of the wisest most trustworthy men I have ever met and his sources are carefully chosen and more trustworthy than he is.

The bottom line is this: Americans make too many decisions surrounding money. None of the subjects have taken the poor economy as a chance to rescue their marriage or even do any work at all towards making it healthier. Our divorce rate is very high not because we choose to marry the wrong person but because we expect the perfect spouse without doing the work to become the perfect spouse. I am not going to go so far as to say that people deserve what's coming to them because I know of too many scenarios where that is not true. But for 40-50% of marriages in this country (depending on the pole) the sanctity of marriage, while important enough to prohibit homosexuality, is not important enough to keep for themselves. Until infidelity and domestic violence are the only reasons for a Christian to get divorced, I don't want to hear about the "sanctity of marriage" again.