Diverging values I think is why it’s not a bad thing that marriage is being postponed closer to 30 now. Promising to be with someone forever when you don’t even know who you or they are yet is wishful thinking at best and lying at worst.
If we ever find a way to delay puberty without delaying formation of the prefrontal cortex, I think humanity will be in for a better time. You’ll get a few more years of being able to have kids after you know who you are.
The other way is that you make a commitment early and that you mold your personalities together as you grow older. Delaying marriage to “find yourself” is not always a good thing; I forget the exact term used in a very thoughtful essay on this, but it’s something like “my grandmother’s bookshelf”. By the time you’re in your mid-thirties, grandma’s bookshelf that you inherited is so important that anyone who doesn’t love it must not love you. In reality, grandma’s bookshelf is important - but so is building a life with another person, and you can’t let it keep you from that.
It’s not perfect, but nothing is. Life happens whether or not you’re paying attention.
Do people who get married and have children diverge in values at the same rate as unmarried people who live together? Or do they tend to converge rather and align their attitudes to the common interests of the family?
"Who you are" is not a stable thing, nor is it a mystery suddenly revealed at a certain advanced age: it is something you continuously construct and reconstruct all your life. I suspect that marriage and family play a massive role in that ongoing psychological construction rather than being independent states that might be invalidated by some sudden discovery of "who you are."
If the issue is immaturity I suspect they can diverge faster. Some people grown up when they have kids. Others don’t, and that becomes a frequent source of argument.
Others collapse their lives entirely, which can be shocking for the person who saw something in you that you’ve now abandoned.
It was historically more of a family obligation than a promise.
We have made it more about individual choice in the intervening years, so you might see that as a promise, but these days it still isn't so much a promise to stay together, rather a promise with regards to how to deal with division down the road (e.g. promising to split the assets 50/50). Not staying together is the assumption.
~43% of first marriages fail, ~60% of second marriages, ~73% third marriages. Roughly half of all children will see their parents’ marriage end or them separate (per the CDC). Frankly, I think people should date, love, coparent, etc, but not get married.
(outside of cases of abuse) The venn diagram of people in my life who have gotten divorced and the people in my life who struggle to communicate their wants and needs is almost a circle.
You have to be open, honest, and willing to listen to the other person while laying your own ego aside. This is something that many people really struggle with. It becomes a power game and trying to prove who's right instead of trying to genuinely solve problems with each other.
I don't get it.
Source: married at 21 and decades later, we're very, very, very different people than we were, but still very happy together.
I have been married almost 20 years, and have seen the same. There's a whole lot of emotionally unhealthy people out there, which is understandable, but then they don't or can't get help to get healthy, which leads to relationship failure. Growing together requires collaboration and humility, which appears to be rare in the aggregate. Also, be lucky (which is unfortunately not actionable).
You can tell by looking at those numbers how much of "XX% of all marriages fail" is a consequence of how many people who get divorced 1x end up getting divorced 3 or more times.
There's a certain kind of Hollywood story where the person goes to the ends of the world to 'discover themselves' and comes back with a whole new life. Such as Eat, Pray, Love. I loathe this story arc with the fire of a thousand suns because if serial divorces teach us anything it's that wherever you go, there you are.
If you're not going into a second marriage with a narrative of, "I think I know what I fucked up last time and I won't do that again," then you're going to end up blaming your new spouse for all of your bullshit that you tried to blame on the first one.
Hm, 57% of first marriages not "failing" (presumably meaning that they last until one spouse dies) actually seems kind of comforting? It suggests that you and your spouse don't even have to be better at marriage than the median couple to avoid divorce.
If we ever find a way to delay puberty without delaying formation of the prefrontal cortex, I think humanity will be in for a better time. You’ll get a few more years of being able to have kids after you know who you are.