I am sick of reading and hearing how easy divorce and premarital sex are breaking up society. I'm sick of being told that marriage, tradition and the nuclear family are a reliable formula for happiness and serving society, and how everything else is somehow inferior. You know why? Because I've grown up with the whole load: traditional nuclear family, working father, housewife mother, blahblahblah, and it's not all that.
The above might seem like I'm very naive, like I feel I've been duped by fairytales or something. That's not the case at all. Nor is it the case that I have an awful family. We're not bad. We're fine. We have our moments where we make a great team. But they are also the reason that I look to the modern way of doing things, the shedding of tradition, and am not scared at all. Because I have seen the other side of the situation. I have seen what it is like when two people who fell out of love twenty years ago remain married because it's 'proper', because they feel like they have no choice and they don't want to contribute to the apparently unfortunate epidemic of 'failed' marriages in society.
Growing up, I thought all families worked like mine did. All my affection was for my mother, I was not close to my father at all, and my parents were not close to each other. The prospect of them divorcing was wonderful, and I always wished it would happen. I thought everyone felt the same way I did about their parents. But then I started to read, and I read books where kids were torn apart when their parents divorced, all I ever heard about divorce was that it was bad for society and children. I never understood any of this. I consumed book after book as a kid, but not even in Jacqueline Wilson's gritty stories of divorce, abuse and stepfamilies were there kids who felt like I did. My parents did everything 'the right way': they dated, got engaged, got married, had kids, remained together. And it was not a good thing. All I saw of my parents' marriage was that it was a destructive force, eating away at both of them - and believe me, I saw a lot of it. My entire life up to this point has been steeped in it. My mother was always happiest monday mornings, when my father would go to work and she could spend all day working in her garden or online or listening to music. When she wasn't doing these things, she was complaining about how much she hated being married. She had never been abroad in her life, she had no friends, she had no privacy or independence. So she talked to me, for hours and hours every day, about how she felt her head would explode from frustration, how my father didn't know anything about her, how she wished it could all just be quiet and free.
As for my father, he lived in a constant and heartbreaking state of denial, whereby he completely did not know my mother on any level whatsoever, knew nothing of who she is as a person, but half-heartedly tried to find her. He felt like the odd one out, rejected by us, and that just fueled that fire because it made him pissed off all the time. He did not have any friends, either.
When people ask 'Do you believe in so-and-so before marriage?' my response is, 'Well, I don't believe in marriage.'
Taken at face value, that might sound cynical, or as if I'm doing what I always dislike when discussing the political: using one example to 'prove' a whole. So, for the record, this all does NOT mean I don't think marriage is valuable, or the right choice for any individual. But I do not believe that marriage or tradition is superior to anything else. I still want my parents to divorce. I want to see my mother come to life, and be free at last. I am about to leave home. I am going a long way away, too far to pop back for a cup of tea at the weekends. I know what it will mean for my mother not to have me there to talk to. I am not leaving home for that purpose, I'm moving to do a degree, but I hope and believe that with all the kids flown the nest, it will open the doors for my parents to call it a day. It will not be a tragedy. It will be like exhaling, after a long, long time.
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I just stumbled upon this, but I know what you mean because I have observed both sides of the coin. Until 12 or so we were the modern Huxtables---a suburban blackish (my dad is multi racial and we both have lighter skin) family with 3 kids and a new home in small town Texas. My parents split for about a year and got back together and we moved to a bigger house in a better part of our small town. But both of my parents have been unfaithful in their marriage. Both of them hold vastly different views on the world and seem to have little in common other than the fact that they grew up in the same neighborhood in Houston. Neither of them have many friends. Sometimes my mom talks about leaving my dad after my younger brother graduates high school. It's hard to say whether it was a good idea for them to get back together but I know that they did it mostly for us kids.