Marriage is a complicated institution. It is a contract for a relationship, which in the past has often been ending up in a divorce. This is different from other decades. In the United States between forty and fifty percent of Americans will end up divorcing (Crawford & Unger, 2000). Now, the question is - what is going on with married couples, and with marriage in general? There is no simple answer for that, but all the changes in the world in the past years could be part of the answer. Society has changed its mentality in a lot of ways, and one of them is the acceptance of divorce as a normal way to end an unhappy relationship. People marry each other for love most of the time; they want to share a life together. But feelings change, families change, and sometimes these changes are irreconcilable. The difference from forty years ago and today is that, now people are getting divorced for all kinds of different reasons that did not exist before. One important example is the change in women’s independence. Women are a lot more independent, and willing to get divorced if they feel they have to. Men are also more often seen performing other roles, that were once only women’s. Sometimes they choose to go on alone, though men are more likely to have a more difficult adjustment to divorce than do women (Crawford & Unger, 2000). People believe that a marriage becomes happier when children come, but a lot of the conflicts that lead to the failure of the contract happen after the “honeymoon period”, which usually ends right after the first child’s birth. The marriage usually demands more work, more responsibilities, and requires more emotional assets. The reasons for the disagreements are different for every couple, but most of them occur because women end up having to perform more roles than men, and end up sometimes having no time to talk to their husbands, or are only more stressed. Mar...
